Who's Exploiting Whom? Agency, Fieldwork, and Representation among Lauje of Indonesia

This article focuses on two events; my 1985 confrontation with a thief who stole my shoes, my husband's shoes, and some clothing, and the subsequent public response to that accusation. Reconsidering the event 17 years later, I reflect on my own complicity in creating the conflict, others' motivations for gossiping about the thief in the first place, and the thief and his friends' motivations for shouting, “American, go home!” I situate myself and the other actors—the thief, the members of the crowd, and gossips outside the conflict—within the political and economic context in which the encounter occurred and consider whether it is possible to delineate the various actors' intentions. I question scholarly assumptions (inspired by Said's Orientalism [1978]) that seem to portray fieldwork as a one‐sided endeavor in which Western agents/ethnographers misrepresent non‐Western others, even act as domineering agents, while the locals are passive victims, without power and agency of their own. Employing a nonreductive feminist theory of agency, I consider the ways in which participants and behind‐the‐scenes gossips exercise a form of agency to implement their desires while simultaneously being constrained by their positions of powerlessness. My conclusion ends with lingering questions about whether it is possible to “really” interpret others' motivations. I propose that a reflexive awareness of my own and others' power and agency can help ameliorate misrepresentation, though never resolve it.