Sociality, Value, and Symbolic Complexes among the Makassar of Indonesia

Abstract

This paper explores the concepts of value and sociality in the lives of human subjects living in the village of Ara, South Sulawesi, Indonesia in the 1980s. Every individual engaged in several forms of sociality that were associated with different sets of values. As members of noble houses and kingdoms, they interacted with nonhuman subjects such as ancestor spirits and valued their ascribed social rank. As Muslims living in a cosmos structured as a great chain of being, they interacted with nonhuman subjects, such as God, angels, jinn, and the spirits of dead mystics and valued individual salvation. As citizens of Indonesia, they interacted only with other human subjects and as citizens of a nation that valued modernity and development. Individual social actors manoeuvered among these symbolic complexes in accordance with the values they were pursuing at any one point in time and were often able to strategically convert the symbolic capital they accumulated in one field of activity into a form of symbolic capital valued in another.

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