Week 9

Context
This plan was submitted in the ninth week of class for Signs of Recognition: Powers and Hazards of Representation in an Indonesian Society, by Webb Keane. The theme for this week was signification.

Plan
1. Keane writes on p. 22 that "the efficacy of material goods rests both on their character as conventional signs and on their economic weight as practical utility - components whose relations are unstable." What does unstability mean or refer to here? Later in his ethnography, he writes that "any approach to Anakalangese exchange must take seriously the coexistence of the semiotic, physical, and economic character of objects" (p. 67). Does unstability then exist in the plethora of possible meanings that we can assign to an object?

2. Given that we were reading an ethnography on performance/issues of representation based in an Indonesian society, I was surprised to see virtually no reference to gamelan in this book. I realize that there is more to Indonesian music and culture than just gamelan but I thought that with the attention given to ritual speech, social life, public demonstrations, and important material objects, a description other than "gongs" would have really helped to unmute this book and better bring it to life. Could this have been an intentional move on his part to avoid the stereotypical Indonesia-gamelan pairing, or was gamelan/music just not an important factor in this particular study in Anakalang (Sumba)?

3. I thought it was interesting that the valuable (inanimate) exchange objects were not made or produced locally (p. 76). I would have liked for Keane to have expanded upon this point further, as I was trying to think of similar analogues in my life/modern society. I thought about luxury goods like porcelain vases, leather bags, or cars that are often imported from far off places (like China or Italy) and the "authenticity" or "exoticism" that makes up part of their value. But this example doesn't seem to cover the value of non-local goods (he also writes that value comes from ancestral origins on p. 76).

4. What are some ways in which we might be able to apply Keane's research on ritual speech to the study of material culture? In his conclusion, Keane tells us, "The first set of themes I have raised concerns the relations between the "symbolic" and "material"" (p. 229). Do we see this in his treatment of speech and words as material objects? For instance, he mentions the "materiality of words and things" and refers to them as "concrete media" on p. 231.