negotiating parentage: the political economy of "kinship" in central Sulawesi, Indonesia

negotiating parentage: the political economy of"kinship" in central Sulawesi, Indonesia

ALBERT SCHRAUWERS— London School of Economics

I begin with the story of a young woman whom I mistook for "Cinderella." This particularCinderella was the poor cousin of my landlady, whom she addressed as "mother." Cinderellaworked ceaselessly in the kitchen, performing the domestic chores of those I duly recorded asher classificatory "siblings." She rarely left the kitchen but secretly pined for her prince, a localmusician and recording artist, forbidden to her by her "parents," my landlords. We spoke oneday about why she was rushing home to do the cooking when there were so many other peopleavailable in the household to do the work. Thinking of the smoky hearth at which I inevitablyfound her, I jokingly called her Cinderella and was surprised that she knew the reference; shehad seen the Disney movie. She begged that I never repeat the comparison to my landlady. Shewas not like Cinderella at all, she said. These were her parents; they provided for all her needs,were trying to get her a job as a teacher, and would eventually arrange her marriage. She workedas hard as she did because she wanted to show her appreciation, not because they made herwork. She was, above all, a "good daughter."

My initial tendency to place her kinship status within quotation marks is a familiar anthropo-logical technique, the rendering of a classificatory kinship system in descriptive terms. Such amove, Schneider pointed out, assumes that "blood is thicker than water" (1984:165) and thatCinderella's "real" parentage could be distinguished from "fictive" or "merely cultural" con-structions. Schneider argues against anthropologists' assumption of the universal primacy ofblood and birth in kinship systems, proposing that blood and birth should be reconceptualizedas metaphors of social relatedness-of only situational importance (1984:187-201). Around LakePoso, the concept of blood (daa) as a shared substance is indeed of central importance to ToPamonan notions of kinship. Birth simultaneously establishes filiation with grandparents andother members of these children's laterally extended family. The To Pamona's undifferentiatednotion of shared substance (daa) highlights Marshall's argument that "what is common to

Widespread fosterage and adoption has recently emerged around Lake Poso inCentral Sulawesi within the wider constraints of peasantization, whereby kin areideologically set off as a source of noncommodified labor for a newly constitutedpeasantry. The differentiation of this peasantry has been blunted and a kin-based"moral economy" created through the transfer of dependents (rather than resources)between households. This transfer of kin has been eased by a concept of parentagethat stresses nurturance and sharing, not just filiation. Class tensions are muted bythe insistence that the calculation of costs and benefits between kin is unseemly.Fosterage, however, opens up tensions as some "parents" exploit their newlyacquired "free" domestic labor. This article focuses on the terms foster children useto resist this exploitation, namely their refusal to acknowledge a parental tie.Drawing on historically constituted relations of subordination, these dependentsdraw on the now legally defunct vocabulary of master (kabosenya) and slave(wdlu.i) to describe their position, (parenthood, adoption, development, slavery]

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kinship, then, is not shared physical substance alone, but the concept of sharing itself"(1977:655). The ease with which children move from house to house reflects a notion ofparentage rooted in nurturance and shared consumption, rather than narrowly defined biologi-cal filiation. The personal acknowledgment of parentage is thus more closely linked to affectiveties established through actual coresidence and shared consumption (cf. Carsten 1991; Weis-mantel 1995)—hence, as I now understand the situation, Cinderella's feelings of loyalty to mylandlords, her "parents," with whom she had lived since childhood.

Cinderella's story was not an unusual one in the highlands of Central Sulawesi, Indonesia.For example, in 1992 between my first and second forays into the field, my research assistantmarried and became the father of three teenage boys almost as old as himself. Another of myassistants, a divorcee, gave up a child to his mother-in-law during this same year. My next-doorneighbor had been father to at least 36 foster children over a period of 30 years. A householdsurvey in three highland villages found that between 8 and 15 percent of all households werethen fostering children.1 A much higher proportion had fostered children at some time in thepast. Such frequent transfers of children between households is not, however, restricted to theTo Pamona; it is a widespread practice throughout Central Sulawesi, Indonesia, Malaysia, andOceania (see, for example, Aragon 1992; Brady 1976; Carsten 1991; Geertz 1961; Hefner 1990;Kipp 1993;McKinley 1981, Wong 1991). Transfers of children between households is commonin both urban areas (Kipp 1993) and rural areas; and in rural areas among swiddeners (Aragon1992:97; Hefner 1990:174-176) as well as in the irrigated rice cultivating areas (Geertz 1961;Wong 1991). As Hefner (1990:176) and others note, "the wealthy adopt children morefrequently than their land-poor counterparts," thus highlighting an essential class characteristicof the adoptive relationship in these diverse settings (see also Wong 1991:201).

Common to these theoretical accounts is the premise, now generally accepted amonganthropologists, that kinship categories are cultural constructions, a point illustrated throughpractices such as adoption, which creates parent-child ties without the benefit of "natural" bloodties. Following Schneider (1984), I would add that discarding the bedrock of biology marginal-izes the study of adoption and fosterage and refocuses attention on the ambiguities ofparenthood itself. If parenthood is not predicated on biological givens, on what basis can theadoptive form be differentiated from "real" parentage? It cannot be assumed that the recognitionof "natural" parentage flows automatically from the event of birth. Whereas To Pamona parentsand children see the recognition of parentage as emergent through time and effort, Westerners'kinship theory of parenthood is inherently structural and timeless, determined by the singlemoment of conception (Weismantel 1995:697). Kinship theory requires a processual approachto parentage that recognizes it as a "transaction in kinship" (Brady 1976). Parenthood, no lessthan adoption and fosterage, is negotiated situationally, not established by nature.

By examining parentage as a negotiated transaction, it is possible to see how the hegemonicidioms of shared substance (daa) in which the negotiated act of parenthood is draped can beused to naturalize power differentials rooted in class. As Williams argues, "It is the interpene-tration of social ideologies of power and classification that allows us to make cultural sense ofmyths of origins and shared substance" (1994:203). To Pamona parenthood is represented interms of shared substance but is itself a hierarchical relationship predicated on unequal controlof resources, both within and between households. The class position of potential parents mustthus be taken into account in the negotiation of parenthood; the moral rights of individualswithin culturally given kinship categories to incorporate children within their households arelimited by their ability to provide material sustenance for their charges. Weismantel writes ofZumbagua kinship relations in Ecuador:

Adoption patterns are shaped by the inequalities of generation and class that permeate parish social life.Young women and men often must relinquish control of the children they engender to older moreestablished couples; unmarried women, in particular, lose their children to their own postmenopaus.ilmothers. And while adults with some economic resources gradually establish households that can support

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dependants, and so are able to keep or acquire children, poor couples often give up their children towealthier relatives—a decision that many find agonizingly difficult. [1995:698; see also Wong 1991:201 ]

It is on these larger constraints of political economy that I would like to focus; however, Iwould not wish to substitute one set of determining structures for another. Although theinequalities of generation and class constrain the cultural categories of who may or may notattempt to bind a child to their household, children are themselves powerful agents in thenegotiation of parentage.

Not all the children I interviewed developed emotional ties with their adoptive or fosterparents;2 despite coresidence and the provisioning of food and shelter, some children resolutelyrefused to address their foster parents as "father" or "mother." Many individuals who had beenfostered in their youth related stories of the beatings they had endured as a result of this refusal.What was missing, they said, was the emotional nurturance by which parenthood is recognizedculturally. They characterized these foster parents as objectionable—"those kinds of peo-ple"—and when I pressed them to clarify, they nodded to the east. It took me a while todisentangle the meaning of those nods, but with that motion, they invoked an alternate kinshipvocabulary, one of master and slave rather than parent and child. The nod to the east was inthe direction of the Laa river valley, one of the areas where a heriditary slave class existed inprecolonial times.3 With that nod, these children stripped the parental relationship of thenaturalizing idiom of shared substance and substituted one rooted in the power differentials ofclass. Significantly, too, they avoided construing this class relationship as one of employer-em-ployee. In negotiating the meaning of parentage, children have alternate cultural resources inwhich to construe the relationships within which they might find themselves trapped.

Discerning the meaning of that nod to the east became increasingly important to me as I heardothers say much the same as they related tales of the beatings they had endured for refusing torecognize their new parents. Most of these children had been adopted by capitalist peasants,that is, peasants who sought to emulate the success of the neighboring Chinese merchantsthrough household business ventures such as small shops, chicken farming, and rice farming.Yet unlike these Chinese merchants, they were unable to hire labor and actively sought toexpand their pool of domestic labor. These capitalist peasants thus took advantage of thepractical benefits of the extra domestic labor and exploited their foster children. Under thesespecial circumstances, the affective ties between foster parent and child suffered. Forced towork long hours at menial jobs while their friends played, the children's resentment grew. Thesewere not diligent foster children eager to prove themselves good sons or daughters by doingtheir chores, but unpaid domestic workers. Many adults reported that they had felt ignored,exploited, and unloved as children in these circumstances. Particularly onerous for them washaving to eat alone in a society where communal eating is a sign of kin solidarity. The only formof retaliation open to them was to reject the language of parentage, in the face of long-termimplications for their education or marriages. Most of these individuals eventually moved toother households where the process of negotiation began anew.

alternate languages of kinship

The moral injunctions of official kinship—"it is forbidden to calculate costs and benefits" (bemaya mombereke)—are of strategic use in negotiating practical kinship ties, the select set ofactually maintained relationships. This discourse is maintained by householders who aredependent on the domestic labor of foster children for the subsistence insurance they provide(cf. Scott 1976:26-29). Yet this discourse is often jarringly hypocritical to their "children," whofind their own emotional and material needs subordinated and their moral claims to householdgoods limited in practice. They are, however, in a position of dependency and powerlessnessthat mutes their resistance; this resistance makes itself known only through the refusal to


recognize the parentage of those who exploit them and through the silent nod to the east. Thesechildren quietly appeal to an alternate kinship idiom. By nodding to the east, they silently invokethe vocabulary of master (kabosenya) and slave (watua).

As I unpacked the meanings of the phrase "those kinds of people," it became clear that thenod to the east did not refer to a particular group of people living there. No matter what villageI visited, "those sorts of people" were always to be found to the east, in some other village, nothere. These people were kabosenya (Big Ones), the now proscribed term for a political leaderand slave owner. Infused with the language of the Indonesian revolution and the assertion "we'reall equal now," every village asserted its egalitarianism, while quietly voicing its suspicionsabout its neighbors. The accusation, as it has now become, of being a kabosenya carries negativeconnotations. One man, himself the descendant of a slave, refused further requests to fosterchildren after he noted the way his own children exploited their new foster siblings. Suchexploitation was based on the knowledge that missed chores would be picked up by morediligent foster children seeking recognition as good children; they gradually assumed the largerpart of the household chores voluntarily. Once the victim of such exploitation himself, he couldnot countenance such behavior in his own family and so deprived them of the opportunity. Yetin so doing, he opened himself to the accusation of being a stingy kinsman, unwilling to aid hispoorer relatives. The nod and the reference to "those sorts of people" thus rephrases fosterageand adoption in terms of covert slavery.

The selection of this alternate vocabulary of covert slavery by children is not fortuitous,although slavery has been legally outlawed for more than 90 years. The practice of slavery wasdistributed unevenly throughout the highlands; a slave market did not exist. Slaves were theproperty of sibling sets as a group, rather than individuals. Heriditary slaves were thusincorporated within this kin group as permanent juniors (cf. George 1996:50). Slaves of all ageswere referred to widely as the children (ana) of their lords (Kruytand Adriani 1912-14, 1:160).Slave households resided independently, but their children were generally taken at a young ageand raised by their masters. These masters then became responsible for paying the bridepriceof male slaves they had raised (Kruyt and Adriani 1912-14, 1:162). Marriage between a manand a slave woman (but not the reverse) was permissible; the children inherited the status oftheir mother unless they were redeemed individually by the father through the payment of aspecial fine to his kin group (Kruyt and Adriani 1912-14, 1:160). Marriage with a slave thusproduced children who could swell either the ranks of masters or slaves, allowing for thedemographic redistribution necessary in any system of slavery (Rousseau 1979). The workingof the system allowed for half-siblings to belong to different estates, a situation similar to certainforms of African slavery as characterized by Kopytoff and Miers:

The kinsman, the adopted, the dependent, the client, and the "slave" abutted one another and couldmerge into one another in the same way that tenants, serfs, and slaves did in medieval Europe.. .. Theoverlap and intermingling between the realm of "slavery" and that of kinship occurred only in this latterportion of the continuum and it is here that the redefinitions of relationships [took place]. [1977:23-24]

Clear parallels can be drawn between the situations in which many children find themselvestoday and these historically rooted forms of servitude that blurred the lines between slavery andkinship. One might argue, in fact, that some cases of adoption {mompatuwu ana ntausangkompo), as it is currently practiced, are a perpetuation of these earlier relations. The formalinstitutional similarity between current fostering and adoption practices and raising a half-sib-ling's slave child reflects a degree of historical continuity; Kruyt (1970:102) noted that whenthe colonial government proclaimed its plan to abolish slavery in 1906 on payment of anindemnity, most masters simply declared their slaves free. Without the payment, prior relationsof servitude continued but were redefined as kinship obligations. The Dutch only half-heartedlypursued their anti-slavery policies.4 Indeed, Dutch missionaries played a role in legitimatingthe practice; foster children (anakpiara) were widely used as servants by the Dutch missionaries


(Kruyt 1970:214; cf. Schuijt-Mansvelt 1919 for a description of the practice from a Dutchperspective). Still, it is only those alienated foster children who dare make the connectionbetween fosterage and slavery, an institutional practice that everyone else seems to prefer toforget.

The subtle implication of slavelike exploitation is not lightly made and reflects the historicaltransformations in—or rather, the creation of—the kinship realm. The negotiation of parenthoodtakes place within the new ideological sphere, "kinship," which emerged in symbolic opposi-tion to a slowly enlarging, state-sanctioned, ideologically distinct, market economy. The officialidioms of kinship, codified in state-sanctioned customary law, designate kinship as an arena ofcivil society set apart on the grounds that "the mutual calculation of costs and benefits is notallowed" (be maya mombereke, i.e., generalized reciprocity). Local commentary on thepragmatic usage of this kinship sphere in an otherwise commodified local economy is officiallyproscribed by such hegemonic statements, yet abuse of kin labor is made evident throughaccusations about "those kinds of people." The hegemonic discourse of kinship in terms ofshared substance, and of sharing generally, thus obscures the difference between the sharingof resources and the sharing of people. That is, the exploitation of kin labor through the transferof domestic dependents transforms and naturalizes a hierarchical class relationship as a parentalone, without the sharing of resources implied by the parental tie. This contradiction may leadto the failure to negotiate parenthood, as dependents cast their domestic exploitation in classterms. Despite the embeddedness of this kinship sphere in a market economy, these childrenphrase these class relations as slavery. In the remainder of this article, I explore the politicaleconomy of parenthood in the highlands of Central Sulawesi so as to explore further the unstatedaspects of that nod to the east.

negotiating kinship

The availability of an alternate set of terms within which to construe kinship relations drawsattention to Bourdieu's (1977) distinction between official and practical kinship. "Officialkinship" refers to representations of social structure produced through the application of astructuring principle or rule, such as blood. These representations are rendered timeless throughtheir inscription in genealogies as if a predetermined fait accompli. Such hegemonic discoursesdo "not just passively exist as a form of dominance. It has continually to be renewed, recreated,defended and modified. It is also continually resisted, limited, altered, challenged by pressuresnot at all its own" (Williams 1977:110). Such official kinship prescriptions are embedded in therelationships of practical kinship. "Practical kinship" consists of the ways in which suchstructural features of kinship are conditional, the "product of strategies oriented towards thesatisfaction of material and symbolic interests and organized by reference to a determinate setof economic and social conditions" (Bourdieu 1977:36). The negotiation of parenthood is aspecific case of practical kinship, and anthropologists should attend to the strategic use of thesymbolic resources of official kinship by some parties and their strategic rejection by others.

A ten-meter-high sign erected by the government at the entrance to the district capital aptlysummarizes the assumptions of official kinship in the highlands of Central Sulawesi. The signbears the motto of the district, sintuwu maroso, tuwu siwagi, tuwu malinuwu. The root metaphorof the motto is tuwu (budding or life). It is used to express a strong sense of living together, beingtogether, and doing together (sintuwu maroso). This internal harmony, predicated on sameness,is strengthened by mutual aid (tuwu siwagi) that originates in common roots and continuesunendingly, like a clump of bamboo that gives off new shoots constantly (tuwu malinuwu). Themotto thus roots life itself in the reproduction of children, who are central to community idealsof mutual aid and familial relatedness. These ideals of internal harmony and mutual aid informthe meaning of the underlying biological metaphor of To Pamona kinship. Shared substance,


daa (blood), may establish hypothetical^ unbreakable bonds among kin, but such ties carrymoral imperatives to act in specific ways: be maya mombereke (the mutual calculation of costsand benefits is not allowed). As McKinley notes of a similar situation, "Even when one's owngenitor is called 'father/ this places him in a moral and not merely a natural category"(1981:360). Mutual aid and harmony are thought to flow automatically from this "axiom ofamity" of kinship (see Fortes 1969:235-237). Kruyt and Adriani, early missionary anthropolo-gists to the area, mistook this prohibition of calculation as evidence of communal ownershipof property by unbounded kin groups (1912-14, 1:151-154).

To Pamona kinship terminology is essentially Hawaiian in ideal structure, with all relativesof the same sex and generation referred to by the same term. For example, the term papa refersto one's own father as well as father's and mother's brothers. They may be differentiated onlyby relative age, with the oldest sibling {kasangkompo; literally, of one womb) of one's father ormother referred to as papa tua (old father). Siblingship extends laterally to include third cousins,again differentiating only between ego's elder {tukaka) and younger (tua'i) kin of the samegeneration (popotu). Children's lives are thus peopled with a large number of individuals whomthey refer to as "father7' and "mother" (ine). Kin to the third degree are referred to as potina, tiedby shared blood through known genealogical relations (and the group of people so tied, assantina). Kinship etiquette discourages referential exclusivity, the reservation of these kinshipterms for one's "real" parents or children alone; the "realness" of a relationship is an emotiverather than a biological judgment, based on a history of sharing and nurturing. It is also relativerather than absolute and allows for the establishment of multiple relations.

It is the members of a santina who are enjoined by the official kinship lexicon's axiom ofamity to avoid the mutual calculation of costs and benefits. This same injunction currently easesthe flow of children between households. The vagueness of Hawaiian kinship terminology inthis context is matched by the vagueness of household boundaries (Schrauwers 1995). As inmany Southeast Asian societies (Carsten 1995; George 1996:50; Janowski 1995), the householdis defined in terms of the hearth (sombori—those who live on one side of the hearth in alonghouse, or banua). Sombori ideally refers to a husband and wife who may or may not forman independent unit of production and consumption; the vagueness of household boundariesin large part refers to multiple and overlapping ties between a number of sombori and individualchildren. These children may be fed in one household, sleep in another, and provide domesticlabor for a third. The looseness with which children are attached to a household eases theirmore permanent transfer under certain conditions. At the turn of the century, Kruyt noted thata sibling's request (or that of a classificatory father or mother) to adopt a child was rarely denied(Kruyt and Adriani 1912-14, 2:69). This otherwise unmarked transfer of children was knownsimply as "raising a sibling's child" (mompatuwu ana ntau sangkompo) and granted that childthe same rights to inheritance as other children of the adoptive couple.5 The adoptive couple,not the "natural" parents, arranged the child's marriage and paid the bridewealth payments.Current child-rearing practices (mompatuwu ana ntau sangkompo) seem more flexible andcover a range of more temporary fosterage arrangements as well; however, the temporary natureof the relationship is not always determined beforehand. The very indeterminate nature of suchrelationships, in combination with the extensive usage of parental terms of reference, makesthe negotiation of parentage possible.

Shared blood is thus a prerequisite but not a determinant of the successful assertion ofparenthood. Carsten (1995:224), citing Fox (1987), has illustrated the general principle thatAustronesian concepts of social identity are not given at birth (such as they are by patrilineageaffiliation in some African societies); a newborn's social identity remains fluid to a degree untiladulthood. The process of "becoming a person" depends on "feeding and living together." Sincebirth also establishes filiation with a wide range of kin, this fluidity of social identity gives manyclassificatory parents an opportunity to establish their own rights in a child. As Kruyt noted, their


request to raise a child could be refused only with difficulty. Theirs are in no sense secondaryjural rights in the child (secondary, that is, to the primary rights of "natural" parents) as describedby Brady (1976:7). Rather, certain kinds of parents, such as unwed mothers, fathers who havenot paid bridewealth, divorced individuals, and the poor, have difficulty binding their childrento their households, and hence to themselves. Unwed mothers receive no social recognition oftheir motherhood role; the common usage of a teknonym {mama x, mother of x) is symbolicallydenied them. Divorced parents are frequently unable to maintain their independence andbecome appendages to other households themselves. Those who are poor or who have a largenumber of children say they simply hope that others can provide better lives for their children.Initially, their children may be shuttled from household to household in a series of attempts toestablish roots. The successful negotiation of parenthood depends on the strategies of practicalkinship and the material and symbolic interests these children represent within the largerpolitical economy of the region.

class and kinship

While the general outlines of official kinship have remained the same over the last century,the practical implications of these relationships have changed as economic and social condi-tions altered radically under Dutch colonialism. Subsequent to Kruyt's pioneering fieldwork atthe turn of the century, the swiddeners now designated as the To Pamona have been reconsti-tuted as a peasantry. They were resettled by the Dutch from hilltop hamlets in 1908 and forcedto adopt wet-rice agriculture in the valley floor on the shores of Lake Poso. This change inagricultural technologies involved fundamental changes in relations of production through theintroduction of landed property, the market, and wage relations. Following Kahn (1993), I referto these changes as "peasantization," a process with two major thrusts. On the one hand, theintroduction of individually owned landed property resulted in a differentiation over time intoviable and nonviable peasant households. Geertz (1963:97), in a different ethnographic context,described a similarly poor area as divided into "just enoughs" and "not quite enoughs." On theother hand, peasantization means low capitalization, such that even viable households withsufficient property depend on so-called free (i.e., noncommodified) domestic labor to meet thebulk of their labor needs. In highland Central Sulawesi, this nearly homogeneous peasant sectorcan be distinguished from the largely ethnic Chinese merchant sector that controls most of theregion's liquid capital. The distinctive economic rationality of the peasant sector should not beread as a sign that a dual economy is at work; all peasants are firmly embedded in the capitalisteconomy (Schrauwers 1998).

The shift from swidden to wet-rice fields was an uneven process that occurred over a periodof decades. Wet-rice fields were opened to meet Dutch corvee labor demands and to raise thecash needed to pay a new head tax.6 These fields remained small until the mid-1920s whenploughs were introduced. The ploughs allowed for radical expansion in field size, dependingon the availability of labor and suitable land for expansion. Since the area is hilly, and waterfor irrigation is unevenly distributed, the number of wet-rice fields varied widely betweenvillages as well as between households within a village. The largest holdings (up to 12 hectares)were opened by village headmen who could call on corvee labor. Some households resistedthe shift to wet-rice cultivation because of age or infirmity and remained without wet-rice fields.

Over a number of generations, these original fields have been partitioned among anever-larger group of descendants. By the 1990s, ownership of more than a single hectare wasexceptional, although village averages vary considerably: the farmers of Buyumpondoli had thehighest average land holdings in the district, with .62 hectare of wet-rice fields. Tendeadongifarmers were among the smallest, with an average of only .32 hectare of wet-rice fields.7

Although the introduction of High Yield Varieties (HYV) of rice and other green revolution inputs


has increased yields, the net effect of the change has been to embed further local agriculture inthe capitalist economy. Thus, the benefits of higher yields are transferred to those with capital.After the introduction of the HYVs in 1969, local ethnic Chinese merchants established controlover the inputs needed to farm: mechanical rice mills, fertilizer, tractors, and threshers. Accessto these inputs was through the mengijon system,8 in which the inputs are forwarded on creditto be paid in unhulled rice at harvest at usurious rates. The merchants also purchased sizeableholdings of wet-rice fields that they farmed with wage labor, entrenching capitalist relations ofproduction in the area. There is thus a clear class division between these large capitalistmerchant-farmers and the relatively homogeneous group of smallholding peasants divided into"just enoughs" and "not quite enoughs." The sizeable increases in yields made possible throughHYVs have benefited only the merchants; they obtain over 40 percent of the smallholders'harvests through market mechanisms.

Smallholders are firmly embedded in a capitalist economy in which access to their own fieldsand its produce have been increasingly mediated by commodity forms. Yet, their holdings arefrequently insufficient to meet their subsistence needs and to pay for the inputs necessary tofarm these fields. These smallholders can be divided into those with viable holdings, who areable to fulfill both their household needs and their obligations to merchants, and those withnonviable holdings, who cannot meet their subsistence needs through rice cultivation alone.Importantly, all smallholders live on close margins and hence seek to reduce the cash inputsrequired to farm their fields (Kahn 1993:65). It is an absolute necessity that they draw on asmany noncommodified inputs as possible. This need to maximize noncommodified inputsmakes the credo of official kinship—"it is not permissible to mutually calculate costs andbenefits"—important in the satisfaction of their material and symbolic interests.9

With so much agricultural production already commodified, the two most important non-commodified inputs are land and labor. Most smallholders acquire their land through inheri-tance, usually at marriage.10 Ideally, parental holdings are divided evenly among their children;however, as parental holdings have shrunk over the generations, many newly married coupleshave inherited too little to become viable households. Frequently, older children will magagu(take more than their share) so as to reach that threshold of viability. Younger children may begranted house plots instead or be given further education in the rarely realized hope that theymight acquire a government job.

Practical kinship ties the viable households of older siblings (tukaka) to the nonviablehouseholds of their younger siblings (tua'i). Elsewhere I have noted the blurred householdboundaries typical of sibling sets in contexts where nonviable households transfer some of theirdomestic functions to the more viable households of kin (Schrauwers 1995). One of thesedomestic functions is child rearing; unable to care for their children, they may ask their kinsmenwith viable households to foster them. These kinsmen, still largely dependent on domestic laborfor the cultivation of their fields, may actively seek to foster older children (both boys and girls)for the contribution they can make in reducing the household's dependence on wage labor.The local moral economy is thus characterized by the redistribution of laborers, not resources,between households within the community. The overall dependence on domestic labor andthe poorer peasants' inability to raise their children have led to the shared construction of akinship sphere ritually opposed to the labor market. Within this ideologically constructedkinship sphere, all participants insist, "be maya mombereke" (it is not permissible to calculatecosts and benefits). This ideology was elaborated through the creation of a gift economy{posintuwu exchange) between kinsmen for weddings, funerals, and thanksgiving ceremoniesin the Protestant church. The logic of the gift is then extended to characterize kinship relationsas a whole (Schrauwers 1999).

In studying local families' negotiation of parentage, I found that the ideological assertion "itis not permissible to calculate the costs and benefits" of kinship could be subverted in practice.


In contrast to those marginal farmers with slightly larger holdings who depended on domesticlabor to meet the subsistence needs of their extended families (including themselves), there wasalso a small number of wealthier householders, including some of the merchants who hadmarried To Pamona, who actively sought to expand their pool of domestic labor. They soughtdomestic laborers (usually older) not only for work in the fields but also for household businessventures, such as small stores or chicken farming—or as an assertion of status, for the extradomestic labor freed the "parents" to pursue leadership roles in the community. Free domesticlabor of this sort was sought wherever the costs of wage labor made the enterprise uneconomical(Schrauwers 1998).

the failure to negotiate parenthood successfully

This attention to child labor differs somewhat in intent from the "materialist" emphasis ofWeismantel (1995) and follows from Bourdieu's questions on the strategic uses of practicalkinship (1977:34). All To Pamona children have multiple parents; however, only some of thoseties are mobilized effectively so that the child is successfully bound to a viable household. Suchties do not preclude other parents from establishing similar, if more limited, ties. The flexibleform of fosterage and adoption {mompatuwu ana ntau sangkompo) allows for a range ofoutcomes that cannot be predetermined. The negotiation of parenthood requires maintenanceand must balance continually the moral rights and standards of parentage with the fulfillmentof the child's needs. Ultimately, the practical logic of household production and reproductionspells the success or failure of the negotiations; even those who aim to adopt a child may findtheir material and symbolic resources inadequate to the task, allowing another to usurp theirparental role. In this section, I focuson the conditions that normally lead to the failure to establishparenthood.

I have already mentioned several categories of parents who are frequently unsuccessful inasserting their claims over their own children: unmarried mothers, the divorced, and the poor.In such cases, a narrow definition of parenthood in terms of blood (daa) is subordinated tonotions of parentage rooted in nurturance. The failure of the poor to assert their parentage isoften rationalized by other prospective parents as the will of the child. Since married siblingsusually live in adjacent houses, they can easily intrude in each other's affairs. Citing the poornurturance the child receives at home, a wealthier sibling may undertake to feed the child:"Look at the poor child, she hasn't eaten yet. And if she wants to be hugged, she knows whereto come." Over time, the child may begin to sleep in the household of the wealthier sibling aswell, especially if a demanding newborn at home is added to the equation. The constant appealsto the child are thus transformed into the child's self-expressed desire to live with mama.

But it is not only specific categories of birth parents who fail to bind their children exclusivelyto their own households; those who seek to raise a sibling's child may also fail. Such failuresare also ostensibly rooted the child's will, the child's refusal to acknowledge the exclusiveparenthood offered. Son, an adopted child, refused to acknowledge his birth parents andchanged his family name to that of his adoptive parents by personal fiat.11 In contrast, lo, whowas similarly alienated from her parents ("they gave me up like I wasn't their child"), wasnonetheless tied to them through their legacy and continuing material support for her husband'seducation, lo's otherwise childless adoptive parents thus found they shared the allegiance ofthis child with her birth parents; this was a disappointment since they had hoped she wouldlook after them in their old age.

In other cases, children simply repudiate their adoptive parents' claims. Kolo was adopted atthe age of seven by an important government official who moved to Java. His adoptive parentssent an emissary to collect their child; actually, they intended to adopt his younger brother. Butthe intended adoptee was working in the fields when the emissary came, so Kolo was sent in


his stead. Kolo was raised by this family until he graduated from high school, at which point hesevered his ties with them and returned home. On his arrival, his "real" mother refused torecognize him, and she beat him when he insisted on staying. When I asked him why he refusedto acknowledge the parenthood of his influential sponsor, he remained silent. His definitiveanswer was simply a nod to the east, and the comment, "They're that kind of people."

forms of exploitation

Official kinship ideology sets adoption and fosterage within a discursively distinct peasanteconomic sphere. This sphere is distinguished ideologically from the market economy domi-nated by capitalist merchants who control much of the village's land. They farm with wagelabor; they also own the rice mills, tractors, and threshers. Within the peasant sphere, graspingpeasants {bagagu) undoubtedly exploit their poorer kin, utilizing their labor to help maintainthe viability of their enterprises. This exploitation cannot, however, be equated with the classexploitation typical of the larger merchant-operated businesses. Through capitalist relations ofproduction, these businesses are able to accumulate capital for reinvestment, and as a grouptheir owners prevent peasants from gaining independent access to commodified factors ofproduction. Peasant enterprises must exploit labor similarly but are unable to accumulatecapital; they cannot exploit market mechanisms in the same way because so much of theirsurplus production has already been extracted by the merchants. Their exploitation of kinsmenthus serves ultimately to benefit the merchants rather than themselves. There is no long-termaccumulation of capital among peasants. Rather, there is a continual division of limited ancestralproperty that leaves their children generally unable to establish their own independent house-holds. In this situation of continually diminishing possibilities, bagagu struggle to maintain theviability of their households through their genealogical seniority, a status that enables them toacquire a greater share of familial resources than their younger siblings. While the parent-childrelations documented so far demonstrate one kind of exploitation, it is only the exploitation ofsiblings that allows for a fairy tale ending to the story of a lucky few of these foster children.

I began this article by relating the experience of Cinderella who, shortly before the end of myfirst period of fieldwork, severed her relations with her foster parents and ran off with her "PrinceCharming." The negotiation of parentage temporarily foundered over the issue of this marriage,which her foster parents sought to prevent "for her own good." Five years later, we met again,as she caught my attention with the words, "Here is your Cinderella." My comment hadremained in her mind, and now she proudly displayed her two children and recounted hertransformation from kitchen servant to teacher. Having run off with her Prince Charming, shehad alienated her adoptive parents and thus found herself increasingly turning to her otherfathers, including her birth father, a widower who had since remarried and had four morechildren. Now the eldest child of five, Cinderella was in an ideal position to take more than hershare of her father's inheritance (magagu). She was able to convince her father to sell half hisland to pay the bribe necessary to get her a job as a teacher. Her younger half-siblings protested,but they were told that since she now had a job and a secure income, she could look after thefinancial needs of the rest of the family. Ironically, Cinderella thus became the potential exploiterof her now impoverished and dependent half-siblings.

Many parents support the unequal division of property among their children as a means ofensuring that at least one of them will be able to take care of them in their old age. Thesepractices fly in the face of traditional inheritance law, but little can be done since most parentsdispose of their property before they die. Because the cultural expectation is that a daughterwill assume this role, Cinderella's story is not unusual. Just as frequently, however, it is theyoungest sibling (regardless of gender) who remains in the parental house, inheriting it andwhatever resources the parents retained for themselves. In either case, the unequal distribution


of resources leaves their siblings with nonviable holdings and dependent on their wealthierbrothers and sisters to "look after them." It is these families that are susceptible to losing theirown children, for wealthier siblings who look after their extended families typically foster theirpoor relatives rather than transfer scarce resources to them.

The domestic exploitation that occurs within the kinship sphere is thus crucial to maintainingthe viability of peasant enterprises. This exploitation, however, is not a simple perpetuation ofhistorical relations of servitude but a form of labor mobilization that has emerged in the nichesof the capitalist transformation of the highlands. The so-called free labor of kin is a substitutefor wage labor. Peasant producers cannot afford wage labor because so much of their ownsurpluses have been drained away by the mengijon system. Green revolution inputs such asimproved irrigation, fertilizers, and the mechanization of agricultural production have subordi-nated even viable subsistence households to the market since their access to these inputs isthrough the village merchants. The benefits of the green revolution thus accrue to the merchants,leaving peasant enterprises (including those of the bagagu) undercapitalized and dependent onnoncommodified inputs.

conclusions

The negotiation of parentage in the highlands of Central Sulawesi is the locus of historicallyconstituted tensions and is thus open to contention and alternate interpretations. Oppositionsbetween blood and nurturance, moral and market economies, slavery and wage relations,dependency and autonomy, tradition and modernization all lie uneasily together in theemotional relationship that develops between children and parents. Which set of oppositionsis invoked depends on a child's willingness to accept a new "mama" or "papa." Thesenegotiations are ongoing and always subject to review and failure. Such tensions highlight theideological importance of official proscriptions on calculating the practical benefits of kinshipwithin the transformed rural landscape. Such proscriptions on calculation are double edged;they work as much to the advantage of those who would exploit kin as they do to childrenseeking support. I have argued that the roots of this tension lie in the larger capitalist economywithin which this official kinship ideology has become embedded.

The quietly whispered accusation of slavelike conditions of servitude is not one that I repeatlightly. I resist interpreting it as a relic of an earlier era, embedded in timeless culture (an ethnicslur, as it were). Many of the villages within which I did my fieldwork did not have a hereditaryslave class historically. The accusation is made in a specific situation, very much in the present,and only after the failure to negotiate parenthood. These failures reflect an inability to nurture,first by the child's birth parents and then by the child's adoptive parents. These repeated failuresbespeak a poverty that demands the exploitation of all available kin resources for the sake ofsurvival. This situation has come about only because all peasant producers, viable andnonviable alike, are simultaneously subject to market mechanisms that exploit them bydepriving them of the largest part of their surplus production (Schrauwers 1998, 1999). Theinability to negotiate parentage successfully is, then, yet another of the "hidden injuries of class,"to borrow Sennett's phrase. The emotional turmoil created by such failures cannot be laid atthe feet of those parents who are unable, through no fault of their own, to provide for all theneeds of their children. Rather, we need to examine more carefully how such poverty is created.

I have elsewhere noted the irony of an economic development model, the success of whichdepends on the exploitation of a kinship sphere within which calculation is supposed to bemoot (Schrauwers 1999). Peasant producers are as dependent on the so-called free inputsprovided through noncommodified kinship ties as they are on market mechanisms for the capitaland tools they need to farm. The only rural credit available to them—the sale of their cropswhile still green (mengijon)—effectively transfers all the benefits of increased yields to their


creditors while burdening them with double their original labor needs and costs. The resultingsocial differentiation deepens the ever-increasing ideological gulf between an apparentlyeconomically irrational peasant sphere and the capitalist economy in a situation where thatpeasant sphere is increasingly embedded in the capitalist economy and vice versa. The timelesshegemonic proscriptions of official kinship with which I began, however, obscure the practicalimportance of kinship in the capitalist sphere. The failure of official kinship, and the failure tonegotiate parenthood successfully, remain the most telling signs of the social strains fostered bythe capitalist transformation of the highlands.

notes

Acknowledgments. The research on which this article is based was sponsored by the PuslitbangKemasyarakatan, Indonesian Academy of Sciences, Jakarta, and funded by the Social Science and ResearchCouncil of Canada. An earlier version of this article was presented at the panel "Varieties of Pro-Parenthood:An Anthropological Approach" at the 31st Annual Meeting of the Canadian Sociology and AnthropologyAssociation. I would like to thank Professors Shuichi Nagata, Peter Carstens, Jane Helleiner, and theanonymous reviewers of American Ethnologist for their helpful comments on early versions of this article.

1. The survey was conducted in the villages of Buyumpondoli (n = 268 households), Tendeadongi (n =161), and Sangira (n = 162), kecamatan Pamona Utara between December 1996 and January 1997. In anearlier survey based on a more limited sample, a single extended family isantina) spread across five villages,I found 38 percent of the households fostering children (Schrauwers 1995:342). The difference in the twosamples can be explained, in part, by a history of institutionalized slavery in the smaller, family group (andits absence in the larger sample). In addition, one of the villages in the larger sample was an educationalcenter, to which many children temporarily moved for the duration of their schooling. The three villagesstudied in 1996-97 were selected because they represent the economic extremes of the district; Buyum-pondoli is the richest irrigated rice cultivating village, and Tendeadongi the poorest. The villagers of Sangiraremain swidden cultivators, their principal cash crop being corn.

2. I refer to the people I interviewed as "children," yet many of them were married adults reflecting ontheir experiences in youth. They varied in age from 15 to 50 years.

3. With widespread intermarriage among the previously endogamous groups of the district and thecolonial suppression of slavery, cultural differences between the two areas are now of degree rather thankind. These differences are invoked only in times of conflict and refer to historical conditions.

4. For example, Dutch missionaries refused to allow the descendants of slaves into their theologicalacademy.

5. Importantly, these rights of inheritance were to the communally owned cattle, cloth, and brass traysof a sibling set, usually of the grandparental (not parental) generation (fau saana). These goods were usedin ritual exchanges at weddings and funerals. They did not include land (which was freely available to all)or other productive resources, as has been the case since the introduction of wet-rice fields in the mid-1920s.

6. The rice harvested in these small fields was sold rather than eaten because animist agriculturalceremonies were not performed due to colonial government intervention. Without the rites, the rice wasthought to have no "nutritional" value. The rice from sawah (wet-rice terraces) was also considered inferiorin taste (Kruyt 1950-51:8).

7. These figures were derived from house-to-house surveys in both villages in January 1997. The figuresfrom Buyumpondoli probably have a greater degree of accuracy due to the common practice of hiringworkers "by the are" (.01 hectare). Local estimates set .30 hectare as a problematic minimum for subsistenceproduction.

8. The linguistically formal usage of mengijon reflects local pride in their command of Bahasa Indonesiabut does not distinguish this practice from its manifestations elsewhere in Indonesia, in particular Java, whereit is colloquially known as ijon, quite literally, "still green," referring to the color of the crop at the point atwhich it is sold.

9. The importance of noncommodified inputs in peasant production is not meant to imply a dualeconomy model with peasant and capitalist spheres coexisting side by side, their economic logic culturallyinsulated from each other (Geertz 1963). Rather, these peasants are prevented from full participation in thecapitalist economy by their lack of capital. Trapped in relations of production that deprive them of most oftheir surpluses, they are forced to seek ways of reducing their cash expenditures.

10. Land is inherited by both sons and daughters at the time of marriage; hence, this should not be viewedas dowry. The amount given is settled after the marriage and forms no part of the marriage negotiations.

11. None of the many families I interviewed had taken advantage of the costly legal process of adoptionavailable through the Indonesian court system, although all were aware of the option. They considered theprocess burdensome and superfluous.


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accepted April 10, 1998final version submitted May 18, 1998

Albert SchrauwersDepartment of AnthropologyLondon School of EconomicsHoughton StreetLondon WC2A 2AE, [email protected]


negotiating parentage: the political economy of "kinship" in central Sulawesi, Indonesia

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