How a travelling society totalizes itself: Hybrid polities and values in Maluku, Eastern Indonesia

Abstract

This article applies Dumont's view of ideology to an Eastern Indonesian society with intense trade connections to other ethnic groups and the larger political economy. In spite of their commercial importance, these connections are framed as long-distance kinship. My question is whether this encompassment of economic by social values is part of a totalizing ideological order. I discuss the values of personhood and exchange to show that long-distance commerce is the source of social differentiation expressed in them. Ultimately, however, the test of Dumont's methodology is not whether it helps explain the resilience of local social orders, but whether it can deal with historical complexity and change. I argue that Dumont's answer -hybrid ideology -is a good description for the encompassment of both kin-based totalities and political-economic stratification by universalizing, Islamic values in my ethnographic context.Totalization -the sense in which society is more than a sum of its parts -is a precondition for valued human existence. In western social theory, this means that the liberties, rights and rationality of the human individual are recognized when this individual is a member of a political society. For Louis Dumont, however, this is an exceptional and somewhat unique ideological model of true humanity. In his argument, it obscures another dimension of humanity (Dumont, 1986: 216): the personal and collective obligations which are manifested as the diverse relations