I then draw on these examples to indicate in what situations we should look for guidance and ideas from indigenous knowledge systems. The paper closes with a discussion of how scientists, social scientists and people with local knowledge can better work together to improve agricultural and natural resource management system. This situation provides an opportunity to explore the logic of delocalization and commoditization of material culture. Definitive explanations are not available, but four lines of inquiry are suggested. The tradeoff between time and money changes as people enter the wage economy.
Houses become vehicles for investment across time.
Access to local resources become constrained while new commercial channels of purchased manufactures are opened. Techniques of construction change as the regional stratification picture shifts in response to external connections. Java The paper looks at long-term personalized business contracts in Javanese vegetable marketing as mechanisms for coping with pervasive uncertainty. It thereby builds on a perspective evolving in both anthropology and in industrial sociology. Comparing exchange relationships along two vegetable assembly channels, it finds a rich variety of contract and non-contract forms of exchange.