The Eroticism of Debt

Pearl Divers, Traders, and Sea Wives in the Aru Islands, Eastern Indonesia

Bibliographic Data

ID2467640
AuthorsPatricia Spyer (0000-0002-0654-6886, University of Amsterdam, corresponding author)
Year1997
Volume24
Issue3
Pages515-538
Publication date1997-08-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueAmerican Ethnologist (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0094-0496 • E-ISSN: 1548-1425
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1525/ae.1997.24.3.515
OpenAlexW2055901015
LanguageEN
Citations received17
References cited40

Seductive and dangerous undersea female spirits provide male divers with pearl oysters and in return demand store-bought goods, thereby revealing their complicity with the Sino-lndonesians who own the stores and motorboats and to whom the divers are indebted. Rather than simply making trade meaningful or mirroring assumed social realities, the fetishized sea wives are crucial to the workings of trade and debt and to the negotiation and refashioning of commerce, gender, and interethnic exchanges, [fetishism, trade and debt relations, gender, interethnic exchange, Indonesia

Complicity · Debt · Economics · Economy · Mirroring · Negotiation · Pearl · Political science · Precarity · Sociology · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Asian Studies and History · Gender Studies · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History · Law

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