| This dissertation is a study of how Mualang society is materially provisioned. The Mualang people are near-subsistence, swidden-rice cultivators inhabiting the Belitang and Ayak River valleys of the middle Kapuas River in West Kalimantan, Indonesia. An analysis of the social organization of Mualang society precedes the analysis of the arrangements for provisioning it and the economic context in which provisioning takes place.;Performance data on material provisioning is used not only to reveal the overall strategy of material provisioning behavior, but also to test the applicability of Marshall Sahlins' "domestic mode of production" theoretical framework whereby the community's profile of household production performance is explained by the particular way in which the society puts economic exchange to political purposes. The relationships suggested by Sahlins' scheme were found to hold in this case.;The focus on forms of reciprocity and distribution not only provides a systematic understanding of Mualang economic life, but is also relevant to several problems of Bornean ethnology more generally. In particular, the tribal model has been problematic, and it has been difficult to specify the place of kinship organization in these societies. Both of these theoretical issues are here taken to be related to the lack of a kinship polity and the unusual relationship between economic reciprocity and political process. Mualang social order is an order specified in customary law, not a political "peace" negotiated on the basis of the manipulation of political resources. In such a context, kinship, although important in social organization, plays a very small social structural role.;With respect to the applicability of Sahlins' tribal model, it is argued that for the economic dimension the tribal and peasant models are not sufficiently contrastive. Instead, the proper contrast is primitive against peasant economic life and the economic context under study is characterized as primitive.;The organization of material provisioning is sought by use of the conventional categories of production, exchange, distribution, and consumption. Special status is accorded to distribution because it is in distribution that the logic by which economic behavior is integrated with social organization more widely is revealed. |
