Hard Bargaining in Sumatra: Western Travelers and Toba Bataks in the Marketplace of Souvenirs (review)

With this publication Andrew Causey has delivered a most accessible and engrossing ethnographic study that should appeal to a wide readership in anthropology, cultural studies, and Asian studies in general. Combining the sensibility of a practising artist with the rigour of latterly acquired skills as an ethnographer, Causey presents a timely examination of a yet to be fully realized area of ethnographic enquiry, namely, the "space" within which indigenous hosts encounter and interact with foreign Western tourists. Causey takes as his particular focus the island of Samosir located in the heart of the tourist resort district of lake Toba in the province of North Sumatra, home to the Batak, one of Indonesia's largest and most recognizable ethnic groups. His goals are, firstly, to provide an understanding of the motivations driving Western backpacking travellers to visit the region and participate in the marketplace for souvenirs, particularly wooden statues and objects. Secondly, he elucidates the cultural constructions the Toba Batak develop and apply in making sense of those motivations and desires that are key contributors to a renaissance in the craft of wood carving, which, prior to mass tourism, was a dying practice.

Causey's approach to his subject is based upon a theoretical framework prioritizing a world where meaning is in flux. Whilst this is arguably the sine qua non feature of human sociality generally speaking, ethnographers have only recently begun to give this in many ways simple, yet profound, insight its due place in social analysis — and Causey's narrative is a fine example of what can be the result. Causey achieves this through his resort to the use of a first person narrative style — an almost dialogic approach, reminiscent of Kevin Dwyer's (1982) Moroccan Dialogues — in which the researcher–cum–participant observer is clearly foregrounded in the context of conversations held with his key informant, Partoho. As Causey remarks, it is his goal to most closely approximate the oral style in which his data was delivered, to "evoke the flavor of the narratives I heard so often while sitting on the woven mats of my Toba Batak friends". This practice gives us insight into the key relationship between Causey and Partoho, the master carver, and Ito, his wife, the master stainer, the former to whom he becomes apprenticed as a carver of statues and art objects for the tourist market. The book is mainly composed of such narrative moments, and whilst we might wince a little at the perhaps excessively romanticist claim on the part of the author to allow "insignificant moments" to "sing their implications to the fullest", the presentation of open narrative supplemented by short expository passages, as well as ample endnotes for those wishing to explore points made in greater detail, is effective nonetheless.

A foundation construct is that of the "touristic place … the place that is both home and not-home … a kind of neutral zone, where cultural rules were partially suspended so that fantasies and urges could be acted out". In support of this Causey emphasizes the agency of the "guests" with his neologism the "tourate", arguing that studies on tourism tend to present images of passive locals being acted upon by outsiders marked as the locus of agency. In Causey's view, rather than hosts and guests we find tourists/travellers and "tourates" in which both are on equal ground in negotiating identity(ies) and meaning. This agency is a crucial element in Causey's argument that the "touristic place" is best understood in terms of Louis Marin's concept of "utopic space", where the normally separate physical and conceptual worlds of tourists and tourates come together, and where the norms and values characterizing each are open, albeit temporarily, to suspension, manipulation, and innovation. Such a space is utopic since it allows its participants to "playfully explore possible ways of being that eventually contribute to their own growth or change". Its participants act...