Research agenda
The conquest of the market, and the values that inform it, has not destroyed indigenous values but, paradoxically, has provided the conditions for some of them to flourish. Money, long believed to be the destroyer of subsistence economies, has become a key instrument for the maintenance of national and transnational kin relations as costs of weddings, funerals and other rituals soar and new forms of sharing money between kin, neighbours and friends develop. This has reached a crisis point in some areas of the Asia-Pacific region today as people find themselves entangled in a web of obligations that can both aid and impoverish them.
An ethnographic approach to the value question opens up new avenues of inquiry because the ethnographer is not just interested in political-economic theories of value (the outsider's perspective) but also indigenous modes of valuation in different intercultural contexts (the insider's perspective). People embedded in the domestic moral economy (DME) are not only concerned with the value of commodities they are also concerned to value kin, neighbours, and strangers using values that are not always shared. This creates moral dilemmas for valuers who have to cope with the ambiguity and coevality of competing values in a world where the economy is becoming a 'non-instituted' process as the market falters with the collapse of state institutions that used to govern it. What an anthropological approach to value has to offer, then, is not an abstract theory of value but concrete analysis of valuers that situates findings within a generalized, historically-informed comparative framework of analysis.
The scope and limits of our study are defined by a conceptual framework that employs the notion of the domestic moral economy through fieldwork in the Asia-Pacific region. The DME is domestic in that it is concerned with a 'kin orientation' to the modern world rather than with internally-coherent kinship systems set apart from it. We are particularly concerned with the ambiguous zone that separates kin from non-kin. For example, when one person addresses a distant kinsman or neighbour as 'brother' they value the other in a gendered and familial way that may or may not be reciprocally recognised. The form of address may become the basis for negotiation, tension, and even conflict, especially when money is involved. The DME is moral in the sense that it consists of valuers who have values that inform their moral reasoning as they meet obligations to other people. Respect and familial love are key values in the DME; the problem is not to establish the generality of these values, but to understand the myriad ways that they are engendered and realised. The DME is economy in the sense that is an integral part of the money economy at large, not apart from it. The word 'domestic' today no longer has the connotation of 'local' as the family has become transnational; families are maintained through remittances and life-cycle rituals in global flows of money now estimated to be greater in size than foreign aid.
Our study is not on the Asia-Pacific region, but from it in the sense that we strive to understand the 'point of view' of members in the DME as they negotiate the world at large. The three senior investigators have carried out long-term ethnographic research at specific sites in PNG, India and Aboriginal Australia. These sites will be used as exemplars to develop a new comparative perspective on the relationship between economy and kinship in the Asia-Pacific region. The literature on this region is now so vast that only a collaborative approach between regional experts of this kind can create the kind of dialogue necessary to grasp the generalities within ethnographic specificities.