The Eroticism of Debt: Pearl Divers, Traders, and Sea Wives in the Aru Islands, Eastern Indonesia

Abstract

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]