Juggling Money

Book excerpt: This social-anthropological study, focusing on urban Indonesia, examines a variety of financial self-help organizations (arisan and simpan pinjam) as instruments for dealing with financial difficulties related to illness, death, and unemployment. The author devotes ample attention to the embedding of these associations, and their participants, in a changing socio-economic and cultural environment, and to the important issues of agency, exclusion, trust, and social conflict. The book not only explains the workings of these fascinating collective arrangements, but also provides an interesting window on living conditions and social relations in an Indonesian urban community.