Sharing is caring : the meaning of money for youths in an Indonesian surfer village

“Sharing is Caring”

The meaning of money for youths

in an Indonesian surfer village

By Rosanne Salimi, 5970229

E-mail: rosannesalimi@hotmail.com Supervisor: mw. dr. O.K. Sooudi Second reader: dhr. dr. G. Nooteboom

Programme: Research Master Social Sciences Department: GSSS, University of Amsterdam

This thesis is dedicated to Coco. Take care brother.

CONTENTS

Foreword 1

Summary 2

Introduction

Field and population 5

Theoretical framework 8

Methods 11

Ethical issues 13

Thesis outline 15

I. Sayang or Customer?

Hunting tourist girls 16

Economic inequalities and transactions within relationships 19

Girlfriends, local tourists, and customers 23

Concluding thoughts 25

II. Work as Leisure and Leisure as Work

Friendship, work and fun 26

Doing nothing 28

Concluding thoughts 31

III. Brother’s Keepers

Surf shops as houses, surfers as families 33

Sharing, caring, and its limitations: when the support system falls short 37

Tourist involvement in sharing 39

Stealing 42

Concluding thoughts 44

Conclusion

1

Foreword

In July 2013 I spent one week in the beautiful village Pantai. Pantai was the first place in six months of traveling where I immediately got in touch with local youths, even before I found a homestay. The boys from the surf shop across my homestay invited me to all sorts of activities and introduced me to their friends. Before long I felt like I knew half of the youths in this small town. Then, I started to notice some interesting dynamics between tourists and locals. Several small, seemingly non-related incidents sparked my interest, such as their persistent flirting with tourist girls; a tourist calling the boys “not real Muslims, because you guys drink beer”; me getting a free surf lesson from a local I had befriended; and a local boy expecting an English girl to pay his food after having spent a day together.

Going back to Pantai for anthropological fieldwork was one of the scariest things I have ever done, and in the field I encountered many difficult and sad moments, especially when dealing with the personal dramas of my informants. But to me, living in Pantai and getting to know a different village, people and culture was not just hard; mostly, my time there was educational, happy, funny, sometimes really crazy, but most of all, really beautiful. I already know I will be one of the “return tourists” I speak of in my thesis; not able to live there, but not able to stay away either. This is mainly because of the incredible people of Pantai. I am so happy for having met you and I cannot express my gratitude often enough. A major thanks to every one of you for the moments and stories we shared. Many of you have become very special to me personally. For the sake of anonymity, I will not mention names here; personal acknowledgements can be found in my own, nonpublished version of this thesis.

When back from living local Pantai life, the writing process proved to be difficult. It seemed impossible to write an academic piece about a town with so many different people and complex dynamics, a town that was as much a home to me as a mysterious and sometimes baffling place. But somehow I did it, I guess, and this thesis appears to be the end result. I could never have written this piece without the help and support of some people back home. Firstly, much thanks to my supervisor Olga Sooudi, for consequently urging me to carry my analysis to the next level – a push I really needed. Another word of thanks to some of my friends and family members: thank you Iris for your support in those first scary weeks in Pantai and your sparkles when I returned. Thanks to Sterre and Annelies, for being patient, and for always being there when I am so lost. A major thanks to Katja for spending so much time and effort in reading and commenting on my piece. And thanks to everyone who was patient with me during those solitary months of writing and analyzing, giving me the time and space to do so.

In July 2013 I only had a vague idea (“I’d like to do something with, I don’t know, youth culture in Pantai…?”). It took a year of thinking, proposal writing and preparing; five months of fieldwork; and five months of writing, for me to hereby present my thesis on the meaning of money to surfing youths in a village in Indonesia.

Rosanne Salimi Amsterdam, August 2015

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Summary

In this thesis I look into the meaning of money for local male surfing youths in Pantai, a small and quiet beachfront village in Indonesia, in the context of increasing international tourism and local development. For most local youths, both surf tourism and the surfing lifestyle, have become increasingly important in just a few years. More and more surfing youths are in regular touch with tourists, either as a surf teacher, friend, or boyfriend. The social relationships and power structures within these relationships thoroughly shape and are shaped by the meaning of money. Also, money plays an interesting role in the friendships they have established with each other. Therefore, in this thesis I discuss the social spaces the local surfing youths move through and the meaning of money in these spaces. Herein, I move beyond polarizations of these youths being either poor victims of a social system or gold diggers in search of money. I do so by reinforcing a theory of agency in which I approach my informants as the smart, creative and socially skilled young people that they are. At the same time I am sensitive to the local patterns of youths dealing with money, with tourists and each other, and the systems of sharing and caring that underlie much of the behavior of Pantai youths.

From October 2014 until February 2015 I conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Pantai. In this thesis I am drawing on observations I made, conversations I witnessed and informal conversations I conducted. I distinguished three key themes. In chapter one, I describe the way in which local youths deal with money within the relationships they build with western tourist girls. I describe their main ways of “hunting” tourist girls. Most of the girls in a relationship with a local surfer pay a lot for the boys. I then continue to describe how a couple deals with the economic inequalities in these relationships and what patterns can be distinguished. I argue that most often, local boys strive for relationships with western girls for both love and money – but I also describe notable exceptions in which local boys pay a lot for their girlfriends because of an underlying notion of sharing.

In the second chapter I continue to describe how work and leisure, and friendship and material interest, cannot be separated from one another in Pantai. Friendships with tourists often lead to job opportunities. I also explore the social significance of surf shops. The shops are places where youths come together, wait for customers, and in essence do nothing with one another. The doing nothing is both a result of as a catalyst for the economic relationships between locals and the tourists. Their hanging out at surf shops becomes a cultural practice in which the surfers create a new cultural category of youth masculinity, hereby unconsciously strengthening social bonds with friends.

In the third and last chapter, I then proceed to describe how the boys share their clothes, drinks, food, boards and living spaces with their friends, brothers, surfer families, and, especially their

brother’s keepers. I also discuss how the older boys take care of younger surfing kids – and I describe

the limitations of both sharing and caring. Boys can be lost when their support system falls short or if they need or want more than their friends can provide for. I then proceed to discuss how many of the Pantai boys steal from time to time and why stealing from friends can be, to some extent, accepted. Thus, in this thesis I discuss how economic interests construct and are constructed by social

relationships, and how the underlying motto of “sharing is caring” shapes youth culture in Pantai.

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Introduction

“Thank you so much for this board, my little [tourist] girl:” 1

***

“For the two weeks we were together, I lived with him, and he paid for everything. Bought me food, drinks, we even went shopping. When I tried to pay, he wouldn’t let me.

He said that because he gets sponsored, he’s got enough money for both of us.” 2

***

“Aww, I hope she’s gonna be fine here with all the drama there was. I find it ridiculously hilarious how beach boys are literally prostitutes! It’s funny!” 3

***

“That day, he showed me where he leaves his guitar. In a room not bigger than 3 square meters. Where he “lives” with a friend. A cloth on the floor is the only thing in the room. That is where they sleep on. Together with his roommate he sang some songs. I was so touched that tears ran down my cheeks. They possess so few material goods but they

possess the greatest talent.” 4

***

1

A Facebook post from one of the Pantai surfers.

2

Quote from a Swedish girl about her short relationship with one of the Pantai boys.

3

Quote from an Australian girl, speaking of the return of one of her friends to Pantai for her boyfriend.

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Pantai5 is a beachfront village in Indonesia. Not long ago, Pantai was just a small town with a few surfers who learned to surf the magnificent waves. Since just a few years, the village is quickly transforming from a small fishermen’s village into a prime tourist destination: “the last year [2014] has been one of the best ever for [the island] in terms of tourism exposure with many thousands of people discovering our wonderful way of life for the first time. 2015 promises to be another banner year with yet more tourism growth and several high profile developments in the pipeline. Nowhere is this more evident than in Pantai”6. The recent developments increasingly draw both tourists and male Indonesian youths to the surfing lifestyle. As a result, the town has undergone some significant changes: the past few years many restaurants, surf shops and homestays have been built. The social landscape of the town is undergoing some changes as well. Since most tourists visit Pantai to surf and the number of surf shops has grown from about five to over fifteen in just over a year, many Pantai youths are currently surf teachers and they often hang out with tourists, sometimes as friends, sometimes by getting romantically involved with them.

In this thesis, I focus upon the role that money plays for the young Pantai surfers. Drawing on rich ethnographic data consisting of observations, informal conversations and life narratives, I discuss the economic practices, relationships, spaces, ideas and material things that are important for male surfing youth. I will show the meaning of money for these youths in the context of increasing tourism and local development.

Field and population

The beachfront town Pantai is located on a small7 island in Indonesia. Numbers concerning population differ per source; arguably, the island counts about 3.1 to 3.4 million inhabitants. The town of Pantai is situated in a beautiful landscape; palm fringed beaches, rugged highlands, large rice paddies, dense rainforests and of course beautifully peeling waves are only a few of the natural scenery one finds around town. Pantai is situated in the south of the island and measures only a few square kilometers. Most surf shops, restaurants, homestays and tourist shops are located along one of the main pathways through town (blue roads on the map in figure 1). One can drive through town in about two minutes – that is, if you do not stop to talk to every local that tries to engage in

conversation with you; then, a drive through town could easily take hours. Although these few roads are the heart of the tourist area, there is much that the naked eye of the tourist cannot see. Between the shops on these main roads, narrow unpaved alleys, no more than dirt roads, lead into a confusing network of small family houses, courtyards, bush and cow pens. Tourists hardly ever set foot here. The villages are located just a couple of meters behind the big bars and surf shops on the busy main roads. Here, local families live in small, brick houses. Most often, their houses are very simple with their only furniture being a cupboard in the kitchen and a few wicker mats to sit and sleep on. Although some families have their own bathroom with a bucket shower, other families share communal showers, set up in the court yards. Cary, who grew up in “the village behind Marley’s

5

The name Pantai and the names of people in this thesis are pseudonyms, in order to protect my informants.

6

Quote from the editor of a local magazine, January 2015.

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Café”, explained to me that Pantai is originally built up by several different small villages, each consisting of just a few dozen houses. Many people in Pantai are somehow related to one another, and there is a lot of friendly contact between neighbors. Most surfers grew up in these local villages. As kids they went to school in the morning, and in the afternoons they played together or helped their parents with fishing.

Figure 1. Map of Pantai’s touristic center with surf shops and bars, and its local villages.

Although Pantai is growing, with new homestays, restaurants and local houses being built all over town, it is still a relatively small and quiet town. According to the data of the village head, Pantai has 8082 residents8. Generally, the island exists of farmers: fifty percent of the gross regional

domestic product comes from farming (Lubben, 1995 – more recent figures are hard to come by). About thirty-five percent of the population is unemployed, and the island is considered to be part of one of the poorest and least developed provinces in Indonesia (Dahles & Bras, 1999). Pantai itself is a

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fishing village, with most residents being fishermen, and with some farmers and cattle9 owners and tenders. Currently, besides fishing and farming, many locals run or work in (sometimes western owned) clothing shops, surf shops, restaurants, bars and guest houses. Most children go to school in the early morning, and some of them work in their parents’ businesses in the afternoon or sell bracelets or coconuts in town. Most local surfers in Pantai are between sixteen and thirty years old10. According to the village head, there are about 1880 sixteen to thirty year olds living in Pantai, of whom 925 are males11. A significant part of these male youths surf. It is hard to find out how many of them surf; but roughly estimating, about 150 to 200 of the youths in Pantai surf (semi-)regularly.

The island upon which Pantai is situated was quiet of tourists until the 1980s. Then, small numbers of tourists started to visit the north and northeast. The first homestay in Pantai opened in 1987, and from the end of the 1990s small numbers of tourists, mainly Australian surfers, started to visit Pantai and the other villages on the south coast. They were still few, though; some of the currently surfing youths hardly ever saw tourists when they were young. After the bombings in Bali in 2002 and 2005, tourism declined, to slowly rise again over the next years (Jennaway, 2008). In 2011 an airport opened only a twenty minute drive from Pantai. Since then tourism growth is more evident. Although tourism growth can boost the economy in Pantai, some inhabitants are not in favour of the rising number of (mostly western) tourists that visit the island each year. They see a big gap between their Muslim morals and the custom of westerners. Around eighty percent of the islanders is Muslim, and all the youths I spoke with were Muslims. Although most did not pray or go to the mosque often (some seemed to feel they were “bad” Muslims because of this), they did attend religious holidays and respected Islamic norms and values.

As said before, the tourism industry is expanding quickly. When I visited Pantai for the first time, in July 2013, a middle aged Australian man said to me that Pantai reminded him of Bali 25 years ago; there were some tourists, but the town was still quiet and still “authentic”12. In the summer of 2013, there were just a few (approximately five) surf shops, and some restaurants and homestays. A small group of boys worked as surf instructor, and although some tourists were around, it was quiet, even in high season. However, the surf boys were eager to get in touch with tourists. Whenever I walked by a surf shop, the boys invited me to join them in whatever they were doing. At night they threw parties on the beach for themselves and the few tourists. These parties were either jam-sessions with various instruments, a few tree trunks to sit upon and a campfire, or a small dance party with just over a dozen people.

Surf tourism and with that the surfing lifestyle, have become increasingly important in just a few years. When I came back to Pantai for my fieldwork just over a year later, the scenery had changed already. Pantai had expanded with at least eight surf shops, and parties were held in four

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Mostly cows and water buffalo’s

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Many of the surf boys I met either lie about their age or do not know how old they exactly are since birth registration was not common when they were born. Of most of the surfers cited in this thesis I do not know their exact ages, therefore I have often refrained from mentioning their ages. It can be assumed that most surfers were in between eighteen and thirty years old, with the exception of a few surfing children.

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One can immediately question whether the data of the village elder is up to date. Many surf boys I have met have only moved to Pantai in the last year. They sleep in a surf shop, at a friends´ place, or with a girlfriend. These youths are probably not registered as living in Pantai, thus the figure of 925 might be too low an estimate.

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big, concrete cafés that were built in town. The turnout on parties was much bigger than the year before, even though high season had long passed. With regards to the surfing youths, there were several distinct friend groups in town. Most of these groups had their own surf shop(s) and favorite bar to hang out at, so, since some groups of surfers did not get along well with others, these groups did not have to encounter each other much. Some local groups of friends were for example more keen on partying and were found on the dance floor almost every night, whereas others kept a quieter pace.

Nowadays, mainly tourists from Europe, Australia and New-Zealand come to visit Pantai, and many of them book surf lessons in one of the surf shops. Some Pantai surfers are employees in such shops and others work as freelancers and are hired by tourists they have befriended or meet on the streets. Other boys just surf recreationally. Still, almost all of them are regularly in touch with tourists. For these tourists it is very easy to get “stuck” in easy-going Pantai. Many tourists in Pantai stay for a longer period than they had planned initially, have been here before or will return soon. Some visit a few weeks every six months – whenever they get time off from work or college – whereas others stay in Pantai semi-permanently. What these tourists have in common is the appreciation of the smallness and familiarity of the village, and the connection they quickly seem to develop with the local

inhabitants. These dynamics account for a field in which the local surfers increasingly get in touch with returning tourists; either through working with them, hanging out with them as “brothers” or “sisters”, or being romantically involved with a tourist girl.

Theoretical framework

Much has been written about the relationships western tourists and locals build and the role money plays then. Within anthropology, literature mainly focuses on whether these relationships are “real love”, “holiday romances”, “purely physical” or some form of “prostitution” (Sánchez Taylor, 2001; see for other examples Pruitt & LaFont, 1995; Dahles & Bras, 1999; Herold, Garcia & DeMoya, 2001; Brennan, 2004). Other research attempts to overcome these condemning polarizations by showing the narratives tourists use to “justify [their] engagements” (Simoni, 2014, P. 166), or by exploring all the different “particularities” (Frohlick, 2013) of the money giving in these relationships. Within aforementioned studies, sex, romance and/or prostitution, racialization and erotization of bodies, power dynamics, gender inequalities, and economic transactions play a prominent role in theorizing the relationships western tourists and locals build with one another.

Some of the aforementioned studies are biased, and in several ways. Sánchez Taylor, for example, extensively asked when and how girls gave their local boyfriends “help in form of cash, gifts and/or meals” (2001, p. 754) without even discussing whether they have ever hád such “help” from these boys. I consider this an immense bias, since in many relationships I have witnessed, helping out, sharing and gift giving occurred both ways. Although many tourist girls often gave the boys more money or gifts than the other way around, in other relationships boys spent quite some money on their girlfriends – see for example the second quote on the first page of this chapter13.

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Also, although all the above-mentioned studies discuss economic inequalities and monetary exchange within these relationships, none of these studies research or discuss the meaning of money to the local youths involved apart from their relationships with westerners14. In some of the papers of these anthropologists, one can sense the use of a capitalist discourse that stresses the

instrumental search of money for these boys: Sánchez Taylor for example describes “local men who are actively seeking money” (2001, p. 750) and Dahles and Bras describe that for Indonesian tour guides “tourists are resources to deploy strategically for making money” (1999, p. 274). But these studies never really consider whether this discourse is the right framework for the analysis of money giving15. These studies do not discuss that the meaning of money is highly constructed, and do not consider to what extent money may be seen as a shared good amongst the local tour guides – with the exception of the research of Dahles and Bras who only casually mention that “having money entails the obligation to share it, to spend it on parties, drinks and drugs with other guides.” (1999, p. 287). However, they mention sharing of money with friends only very curtly, without any explanation for it.

Up until now, research into “intimate economies” (Wilson, 2004) focus indeed firstly upon the intimacy, and then upon the complex economic transactions that take place16. Thus, the studies I have cited above all study love and/or sexual relations in which economic inequalities are dealt with. However, I argue that we should be looking at how money is dealt with inside as well as outside of these one-on-one romantic relationships to see how money works. I argue that before we can even begin to understand the relationships between western girls and Indonesian beach boys, we should focus first and foremost upon what money exactly is to these youths, because how else can we discuss to what extent social relationships are motivated by economic motives? We will need an anthropology of money that is sensitive to the very local, cultural norms and values that shape the perspective of locals upon money. This research aims to provide for such an anthropology. In that sense, my research contributes to this discussion not through using the “usual” starting point of love- and/or sexual relationships between tourists and locals. Rather, it looks at the meaning of money for these youths, and their life style that both influences the meaning of money and is influenced by it.

In this, I will show how the boys are embedded in (and reinforce) a system of monetary and material support that encompasses both tourists and their local friends. The ties between local youths are important in taking care of one another: “sharing is caring” is a much-heard phrase. As I will show in this thesis, the support system in Pantai is largely based on upon sharing. The

harmoniousness of sharing in Indonesia’s villages is questioned by some works within anthropology (White, 1983; Nooteboom, 2015). These anthropologists critique the writings of Geertz (1963, in

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This is not the only form of critique one could direct to these studies: one could also say they are racist, for treating the flirting techniques and dress of beach boys in such different ways from how one would describe “western” habits, or how they are highly condescending, for arguing that the beach boys economically exploit western women whilst within western relationships economic inequalities between men and women are never really referred to as exploitation (think of marriages within which one spouse is economically dependent from the other). But this is not a discussion I mean to get into here.

15

I will discuss this in chapter three.

16

Which is true for all the research into cross-cultural relationships and money I have so far cited, thus: Pruitt & LaFont, 1995; Dahles & Bras, 1999; Herold, Garcia & DeMoya, 2001; Sánchez Taylor, 2001; Brennan, 2004; Wilson, 2004; Frohlick, 2013; Simoni, 2014.

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White, 1983) who introduced the notion of “shared poverty”, and argued that a pervasive ideology of sharing determines the “actual relations of distribution between classes” in rural towns in Indonesia (White, 1983, p. 27). Nooteboom (2015) rejects this overly romantic image of Javanese villages. He adheres the popularity of this point of view to Indonesian policymakers and elites who gladly support this discourse because it reinforces the idea of a viable support system in Indonesia’s villages. However, both Nooteboom and White do agree on the “existence of a pervasive public ideology of sharing and reciprocity (…) [and] the widespread, actual ‘sharing of poverty’ ” (White, 1983, p. 27). Much in the same way, the boys in Pantai are immersed in friend groups in which sharing is an important support system.

Still, it should be understood that sharing and caring is neither limitless nor solving poverty for Pantai’s families. Some researchers who study poverty in rural environments in Indonesia represent local villages as harmonious and egalitarian communities; and their ideas on taking care of another and poverty sharing as great leveling mechanisms are very persistent (e.g. Li, 2007 and Tsing, 1999; both in Nooteboom, 2015). In this thesis I nuance this point of view. In chapter three I argue that youths in Pantai indeed share, but that sharing and taking care of each other is only up until a certain point. What happens when a support system falls short, and what other ways do youths have in dealing with monetary problems?

So next to studying the role of money in romantic relationships, in this thesis I also point at the way locals deal with money amongst each other. The main question I then aim to answer in this thesis is: What does money mean to the local male surfing youths in Pantai, in the context of increasing international tourism and local development?

Thus, my thesis accounts firstly studies money and relates it to the social spaces the surf boys move through – both the friendships and social networks the boys have established with each other and the romantic/sexual relationships they build up with western girls. Consequently, this thesis should not be read as a paper solely or mostly on cross-cultural and cross-class relationships,

exploitation, gender, structural exploitation, sexuality or racialization of bodies. All issues discussed in this thesis were securely considered insofar as these topics appeared relevant to the larger picture of money; however, they are not main themes within my thesis. The academic value of this piece is then that it offers a different perspective upon the role of money for youths in touristic areas, since this research focuses on the meaning of money within a local culture that is subject to increasing international tourism.

During my fieldwork I have seen and heard from tourists who typified the youths I worked with as either gold diggers and prostitutes, or as poor youths with no future chances: see for example the two last quotes on the first page of this chapter. In this thesis I aim to go beyond this polarizing and condemning discussion. I will refrain from defining what “types of youths” the local surf boys are since I feel like it is impossible and therefore ethically incorrect to generalize and polarize the boys’ behavior, since I have seen every boy dealing with western girls very differently.

Hence, with this research, I attempt to provide a different framework for the understanding of money in these communities. Herein, I deliberately paint a picture of money that is incongruent with the assumptions discussed above, e.g. the assumption that “tourists are resources to deploy strategically for making money” (Dahles & Bras, 1999, p. 274) or the suggestion that dollars might be

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“a girl’s best friend” (Sánchez Taylor, 2001, title of her article). I do so not because I wholeheartedly disagree with assumptions made in aforementioned studies. However, I do feel like some conclusions concerning the role of money are too one-sided; either as a result of indolence or from a lack of sensitivity towards the other possible frameworks one can adopt. Thus, with my thesis I deliberately problematize the assumptions of these studies. In doing so, I adopt a perspective similar to James Clifford’s (1986). This thesis is based upon systematic, careful and reflexive observation and analysis within a clearly defined area of research, field and population. However, it is still my subjective story. The data I base my argument on is partial and incomplete. Much as Clifford describes Crapanzano, I admit at being, to some extent, a “trickster”, promising “not to lie, but never undertaking to tell the whole truth either” (1986, p. 6). My personal experiences were central in the process of observation, analysis and writing, and the point I make in this thesis can therefore be contested. Using the “powerful “lies” of exclusion and rhetoric” (1986, p. 7). I’ve (sometimes somewhat artificially) constructed, I am intentionally trying to stir the discussion on the meaning of money in local environments, because in my opinion, this issue has not fully been debated yet.

Possibly one of the biggest “lies of exclusion” I have employed, is how I represented groups of surfers in this thesis. Some surf shops are located in the center of town, whereas others are situated further inland. Some groups of surfers are more interested in getting in touch with tourists compared to others, and some groups are often represented at parties; others hardly ever show. Hardly

surprising, the surfer community in Pantai consists of different groups of friends and colleagues, and within these groups, boys who all have different goals, beliefs, ideas and personalities. Although I have met and spoken to many of them, this thesis is based mostly upon the surfers who work with tourists more often, show up on parties on a regular basis and eagerly talk to tourists on the streets. Consequently, the loudest surfers are the ones most often represented in this thesis.

Methods

I conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Pantai for four and a half months from October 2014 until February 2015. My main method of research was participant observation. I tried to make myself familiar with the practices, spaces and social contacts that are important to male surfing youths in Pantai, and I followed them in the spaces that seemed to make up key locations in town. Whilst doing so, I observed their daily activities, their interests, their relationships with tourists, their work routine, the friendships they have with each other, their conversations, et cetera. The surfing youths I had met in 2013 immediately welcomed me into their group of friends and colleagues. Other youths just stopped in the streets to talk to me, or reached out to me whenever I sat down in a warung (local eatery)17.

After three weeks of fieldwork I moved into the home of Robbi, a surfer who owns a surf shop and a bar in Pantai. It appeared that Robbi took care18 of six kids19, who also lived in his house.

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As I will discuss in chapter one and two, getting in touch with tourists is one of the main activities the boys spend their time with; which is why I did not suffer from a lack of contacts.

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In chapter three I will discuss how surfing children, who often live with older peers or in surf shops, are being raised into the surf community.

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During the day, the kids often surfed; if the waves were small or if no one could give them a ride to the beach they would hang out in the house or at the surf shop together, watching television or semi-sleeping. At night they slept in the small living room on mats and cushions. Because of my living situation I was completely “immersed in the field”; whenever I was not with the older surf boys, I would be with the kids, observing them, talking and playing with them, and getting insight in their lives and upbringing. Living here was intense, but also extremely informative. At a later stage during my research we had to move out of the house for practical reasons. Robbi found a small room for himself and the kids, but there was no place for me in their new house. Because one of the important themes in my research arose as being the relationships between local boys and tourist girls, I decided to move into a room with a western girl with whom I had become friends. She was in a relationship with a local surfer, and introduced me into the small community of tourist girls that stayed in Pantai for a longer time. Living with her gave me the opportunity to get a more thorough insight in the relationships between the local boys and tourist girls.

Besides extensive participant and embodied observation, I had planned to have informal conversations and unstructured interviews. When I arrived in the field, however, I quickly realized that the data I collected through questioning was not data I could fully rely upon. Very often I encountered situations where people gave me contradicting information or acted conflictingly with what they had told me before. Locals are very interested in hanging out with tourists, but that there is a myriad of reasons why they do not want to answer questions; questions that they found too personal, boring, or downright stupid they often did not answer. Sometimes they just wanted to have a little fun and messed around with me, giving me vague or unreliable information. I realized I had to focus mostly upon observations. Whenever the local boys started to talk to me on their own

initiative, they sometimes did tell me about growing up, their family, their upbringing and how they learned to surf. Then I used informal conversations to learn about key characteristics of my

informants, such as their ages, personal background, family and peer relationships, occupational desires, origin and future plans. The informal conversations sometimes only consisted of a couple of questions from my part; at other times they took on a form of an unstructured and informal interview or a narrative about one’s youth. Still, I have been careful with the data gathered from informal conversations and interviews, so my thesis is mostly built upon my observations and the conversations I witnessed.

Lastly, when writing my thesis, I found the blog of one of the girls who had been in a relationship with a local surfer. During my stay, I had informal conversations with her about him, but on her blog she reflected extensively upon their relationship. Her blog appeared to be a great source of information. Realizing this, I also used e-mail conversations, text messages and Facebook statuses to provide examples and build my argument.

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Ethical issues

I am still very much struggling with this issue. I just feel like I am taking away their right upon anonymity. Most of them knew I was writing about surf and youth culture in Pantai, and all of them knew I was interested in tourism. But I doubt they would be happy when they knew that some of the topics that I am writing about are

relationships, drugs, and money. I am still struggling with this issue. I know there are things I can do, such as not using their real names in my thesis, or asking certain people if I can share their pictures or stories. But I still feel uncomfortable with regards to this issue. The one or two times someone asked me to read my thesis when it is done, I get uncomfortable, knowing that their stories might be in it. I try to keep in mind that I am genuinely interested in their story and in them, and not only in a research kind of way, and that I truly like them (which is truly the case). This helps a bit, but still doesn’t account for the fact that I am sometimes writing down details of their personal life.

- Excerpt from my fieldwork diary

In the field, I faced several difficulties. The main issue I had to deal with was my immersion in the field and the way it influenced my contacts, thinking process and writing. For over four months, I was fully immersed in the field for 24 hours a day. As I lived in the field, everyone around me, including my house- and roommates, were informing me for my research. Soon, I became good friends with some people in Pantai. I got uncomfortable spending so much time with them, while at the same time writing down things about them in my field notes. I have always been clear about the purpose of my stay in Pantai: I told people that I was writing about life in Pantai and the influence of increasing tourism on youth culture. However, I doubt that the people I encountered realized that this means I wrote about them and their lives, which in some cases resulted in me painting a rather unflattering picture of them in my notes – although I tried to be as considerate as possible. When returning from the field and analyzing my data, I still struggled a lot with these issues. Consequently, I decided to shift my topic towards a theme where very sensitive data was not of relevance20.

Still, I strongly felt like I was prying in the lives of others. Ethical questions regarding the positionality of the researcher are inherent to anthropological research. Especially in research where informants are from peripheral regions, an anthropologist needs to deal with issues concerning researcher authority and positionality. As Besnier (2009, p. 24) points out, informants “generally lack familiarity with the intellectual and social context in which the research is embedded”, which makes it difficult to strive for informed consent from the people in our field21. On top of that, I felt hesitant towards fully explaining my research aims and themes to friends and acquaintances, for fear of them behaving differently towards me or breaking off the friendship we had established.

20

I choose the angle of this thesis not solely from an ethical point of view, but also because, analytically, the data upon which I am now building my thesis is the most consistent, complete and interesting to work with.

21

This could also lead to a general wondering who exactly is a “part” of the field, and who is not, but that is not a discussion I mean to get into here.

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Some anthropologists are more critical than others regarding the ethical implications of fieldwork in developing countries. Some researchers theoretically agree that this kind of research can be problematic, but disregard the empirical consequences of such a point of view. On the other hand, radical anthropologists argue that anthropological research is just another form of the colonization of the lives of people in developing countries (e.g. Minh-ha, 1989). Western anthropologists are then said to exert a certain degree of hegemony over their informants, who are exploited and treated as objects (Trask, 1991).

I believe, however (and I realized this through performing this research), that if we adhere to the “hegemony argument”, we deny the agency of our informants. The youths I worked with are not only poor; they are also creative and smart. Also, they are not just helpless victims of a formal system that is failing them, but they are socially skilled and hard-workingyoung surfers; not just in the sense of laboring, also in the sense of constructing and maintaining a self-image and appearance. As I discussed in the previous section on ethics, the youths I worked with often try to influence the way people think about them and act towards them; they might lie when someone poses them a too personal question, they make up an answer when they find questions boring or dumb, they joke around with tourists and they often present themselves differently to different people. Thus, we should be aware of the power of informants to present themselves, to shape, produce and influence their relationships, their practices and their living circumstances, and this is how I am presenting the youths of Pantai in this thesis.

Thus, firstly, in this thesis I aim to go beyond looking at these youths as the poor victims of societal structures – and I do so partly by describing the relationships and support systems of “sharing and caring” they are embedded in and, to some extent, maintain. Secondly, I am trying to overcome the condemning labels that some people in the field or even some authors try to impose on these youths, like Thomas Moog in his book on the “history, facts and mysteries” of the island, where he writes that “Pantai in particular risks becoming a center of sex tourism, especially for female tourists” (2013, p. 109).

So in this thesis, I aim to reinforce a theory of agency that goes beyond the trichotomy of these youths being either 1. overlooked and powerless victims within the formal institutions of society; 2. gold diggers in search of a “better life” through involvement with western tourists; or 3. young exotic “others” who build and maintain paradisiacal romantic relationships with western girls22. I will do so by discussing the role of money for the boys in the community, because social

relationships and the power structures within these relationships thoroughly shape and are shaped by the meaning of money.

22

Some studies stress the way black bodies are sexualized, seen as “essentially different” and “alluring and exotic” (Sanger, 2009, p. 137) or describe the use of a discourse in which Asian people are seen as “exotic commodities” (Nemoto in her piece on cross-cultural marriages, 2005). Although I recognize this discourse in some conversations I have had with tourist girls, it is too easy and one-sided to argue that most tourist girls see the boys like this; it is simply much more complicated than that.

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Thesis outline

My main focus is the meaning, the workings and the flows of money in the surf community, but a large part of my thesis will also revolve around social relationships. Growing up in Pantai, the style of living and the way local youths deal with tourists are inherently connected to ways of money making and spending. Thus, this thesis will explore the meaning of money for local youths in the context of increasing surf tourism and local development.

In the first chapter, I will argue that for the surf boys in Pantai, monetary transactions and romantic relationships are inherently intertwined with one another. I will firstly describe the ways boys try to get and maintain in touch with western tourists. This often results in both love

relationships as well as in possible monetary benefits. They undertake these relationships often both for fun and for instrumental reasons; girls can be both their “sayang” (darling) as their “customer”, and therefore they approach westerner girls happily, eagerly and creatively. The way the boys deal with tourist girls varies widely: in this chapter, I will outline some patterns I saw.

In line with the first chapter, in chapter two I proceed to enquire how work and play (or: rest) are generally not separate activities; rather, they overlap. I will show that, with regards to the activities of the surf boys, one often cannot distinguish between work or play. Herein, I will discuss the friendships they build with western tourists, and the way these friendships often account for jobs. In the first chapter, I have focused upon the romantic relationships with female tourists; both this chapter and the next one then discuss both male and female tourists, and their connection they make with the local boys in terms of friendship, work and money. In the last section of this chapter I will then show how the local surfers lazily “do nothing” on the floors and porches of surf shops, whilst they are waiting for tourists, for customers, for friendship and for excitement, hereby creating a masculine youth culture of freedom.

In the third chapter I will proceed to discuss how the slow, social pace of life in this small community is connected to the meaning money has for the surfer boys. Herein, I focus firstly upon the style of living; I will show how the boys live and sleep in surf shops together and how money-sharing is related to this style of living. Furthermore, I discuss how surfing children grow up in Pantai and how young surfers navigate through a web of older peers, sharing their money and houses with them, and western tourists – and I will also discuss the limits to this support system and discuss what happens when caring ends. Also, I will discuss the act of stealing – from westerners, and from each other – and show how it fits within the framework of money sharing, taking care of each other, and maintaining friendships. I will show how and why stealing from each other is to some extent accepted, and will discuss the ambiguities behind the act of stealing.

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I. Sayang or Customer?

Although I have argued in the introduction that we need to look at the role of money in itself before looking at what the love relationship actually means to the two parties involved, the way money is dealt with cannot be separated from the social environment it is embedded in. One of the social relationships the Pantai boys are involved in are relationships with western girlfriends. Although some studies try to make sense out of these relationships by labeling them as either “relationships for love” or “relationships for money” (e.g. Brennan, 2004), in this chapter I aim to show that in Pantai, relationships for love and relationships for money are not mutually exclusive. In Pantai, building up relationships with western tourists is often partly motivated by economic gain for the surfers; and when in a relationship, a surfer receives money from a western tourist girl, that does not mean that the relationship is not based upon feelings of genuine liking, romance or love. In this chapter, I will explore the social dynamics between western tourists and Pantai surfers and I take into account the economic motivations for and results of these relationships. In order to show how personal relationships influence monetary exchange, I will first discuss how the Pantai boys generally deal with tourist girls and show how their “hunting” of tourist girls often leads to the girls staying longer in Pantai. I will then show how the couples deal differently with economic inequalities once a romantic relationship is established.

Hunting tourist girls

Today I walked through the village and encountered a few surf boys at Grommet Surf Shop, where they were hanging out. They immediately asked me if I wanted to join them so I sat down. There were about eight boys: Darion, Jimmy, Jamil, Ely, Owen and Dani were amongst them. Darion and Ely I knew from about a year ago, when I was visiting Pantai for the first time; the others I had met last night. Jamil immediately came up to me to give me a hug. The other boys just said hi and looked at Jamil funnily. Someone asked me where I was going and they all started to invite me to all sorts of things; trips to other islands, surfing tomorrow, hanging out on the beach, or the party tonight. Furthermore, they joked about Jamil’s efforts to win some attention and hugs from me. He put his arm around me, laid his head on my lap and looked deep into my eyes.

- Excerpt of my field notes of my second day in Pantai

When the German girl Lianne arrived in Pantai for the first time, which was about a month before I spoke with her, she had planned to stay for just a couple of days. However, on her fourth day in Pantai, she met the local surfer Trey, with whom she immediately felt a deep connection. Although

17

their (short) time together was characterized by many ups and downs, she ended up staying with him for eight days. They mainly hung out with his friends in bars, restaurants and on the beach; also, he had taken her out to go spearfishing and once he took her surfing. At other times he would surf and she would hang out on the beach, watching him. Lianne was also introduced to his family, where they went to have dinner on her last day of her first stay. They ate their dinner “local style”; seated on a wicker mat on the floor they shared plates and ate with their hands. Trey’s nephew called her bibi (aunt). When Lianne left Pantai, she took a slow ferry to a nearby town instead of choosing for a faster, more expensive one. She was surprised to see that she and her German friend were the only tourists on the boat: “Apparently, tourists choose for the more luxurious boats. But Joyce and I aren’t tourists anymore”.

Above narrative elucidates how, through introducing girls to their friends and family, the Pantai boys make them feel like a part of the local community. Often, the surf boys act as a catalyst within the process of girls becoming “local tourists”; a term they use to describe tourists that have been in Pantai for a long time and that start to take over local practices. The relationship between the surf boys and tourist girls seems to be balanced upon an interplay between the boys engaging with the girls, asking them to participate in their lives and making them feel welcome, and the girls happily taking part in these “local style” practices. And although boys often cannot be seen in public with local girls23, they can take tourist girls home to meet their family, to have dinner there, sometimes they sleep at the boys’ parents’ house together, and they get invited to several kinds of events. When attending celebrations like weddings local women help the western girls put up or braid their hair, paint their faces white and put make-up on, and provide for traditional clothes.

It is clear that surf boys go the extra mile to make western girls feel welcome in Pantai and to get them to hang out with them. They accomplish this also through the language they use with tourists. Often when tourists eat with their hands, squat on the floor instead of sitting on floor or chair, or use a squat toilet or a bucket shower, locals make joking remarks such as: “Ah, you’re a local now!”; “We only have a local toilet, is that okay?”; “Eating local style!”, and tourist girls often take over this way of talking. Often girls see Pantai as their (second) home and the boys confirm this by always welcoming “home” returning tourists. Thus, the use of certain linguistic elements makes the girls feel like home. Also, the boys often use phrases that are focused upon feelings of family. The surf boys call each other and male tourists brother (or, shortened, bro or bra)24. Girls with whom they flirt are called sayang (darling), and other girls25 are sisters26. Tourist girls also take over this manner of

speaking: “All of these faces had become brothers and sisters. (…) I had become a local after two weeks”. Often, tourist girls that stay in Pantai for a longer time start to mingle Indonesian or local words into their daily English speech. Tèh (let’s go); aoq (yes); tidak or ndek (no); ndek noun (I don’t know); mah (here you go/I want to give you this); maeh (can you give me that); chum chum (kiss);

mau ([I] want); hati hati (slowly/careful); jogang (crazy) and cintak (love) are just a few examples of

words that are incorporated in English speech, as some sort of a “local tourist language”27. Thus, in

23

For reasons I will later in this chapter discuss

24

Older men or men who have some kind of authority over them are called boss.

25

For example girlfriends of their close friends, or female friends of their own girlfriend

26

Also, the mother of their female friend of girlfriend is called mom.

27

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their attempts to make the girls feel welcome in Pantai, the surf boys invite them to come visit their family and to attend certain celebrations, and through certain linguistic constructions they make them feel at home. This often works out well; many westerners I spoke with, found the people in Pantai very friendly and stuck around longer than they had planned.

The boys also use more explicit ways of flirting with tourist girls. One of the surf boys, Dia, tells that he came to live in Pantai about nine months ago. Before, he lived with his parents in a nearby village, where he worked on a small boat, bringing tourists to remote beaches. Nine months ago he decided that he wanted to work in a surf shop, and thus he started to work and live in a surf shop in Pantai. In the nine months he has been living here, he tells me slightly embarrassed, he has been with so many girls. “Thirteen, or fourteen maybe”. He laughs nervously. Pantai is where he learned to hunt: “From friends, from just trying out, and seeing what works and what doesn’t.” I ask him what works. Dia says, “looking into her eyes, smiling, talking, laughing, dancing”. Touching? “Not in the beginning. After a few days, yeah after a few days you can touch a girl a little bit. But you don’t want to be too forward. You can touch her a little bit when you are dancing with her, but that’s it”.

In the act of “hunting”28 tourist girls, the boys are often very persistent, and girls find them very charming: “Joyce said to me: “Lianne, you have to take a look outside.” (…) Outside Trey sat with a guitar on his motorbike, playing a love song. And another song and another one and another one. He played me a serenade for one-and-a-half hours”. Besides that the boys are very charming in conversations, most local boys possess great musical and physical (dance, surf) talent, which amazes the tourist girls. For some boys hunting seems to be the main way of socializing with girls, and they are quite persistent hunters. When I spoke to him, Dia was going out with Violet, a Dutch girl that came to Pantai about three weeks before. I ask him how he hunted her. He tells me that they would hang out as friends, since she was together with another surfer. When they had broken up, Dia and Violet would go out together and every night she would bring him home on her bike, and then she would go home by herself. The first night she dropped him off, he wanted to kiss her but she did not want to. Dia realized that she wanted to take it step by step, and the next night, he kissed her on the cheek. Then the next night they “kissed a little bit”. And then the next night they kissed more.

The boys have different ways of getting in touch with tourist girls. Some get to know girls through giving them surf lessons. Others meet them at night, in one of the few bars. Many girls also get in touch with the boys on the streets: most often, there is a group of surf boys hanging out together at one of the surf shops, trying to engage in conversation with tourist girls (and sometimes guys) that walk past: “Hello sayang (darling), where are you from?”; “Sayang, sayang you come party tonight?” or joking and playing around with them: “Sister, you dropped something! … Thank you for looking!”; “Sayang where are you going? You want to go to the moon with me?”29. Most surf boys are eager to meet new tourist girls. On party nights, some boys say that “tonight, I go hunting [tourist girls]!”. They hunt by staring a girl deep into her eyes ; laying their head down on her lap; taking a girl’s hand and not letting go; kissing her on the cheek; hugging her a lot; and sometimes even by downright asking why the girl does not want to be his girlfriend30.

only tourist girls.

28

A term the surf boys use themselves.

29

Implicitly joking about the use of magic mushrooms.

30

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The boys charm and hunt the girls for two main reasons. Firstly, they like the tourist girls and want to be romantically involved with them. It is a lot harder to have a relationship with a local girl, since a local couple risks a lot: if anyone sees the couple together at night or if the girl gets pregnant, they have to get married. Thus, the couple needs to be secretive around each other. The stakes for a local couple are high, whereas a relationship with a tourist girl is characterized by freedom. This can be seen in many little things that characterize a relationship, such as Pantai surfer Cary telling his friend Larry, who had his first tourist girlfriend: “You can hold her hand in public, don’t be shy, she is not a local girl”. Possibilities seem to be endless, which makes it easier to be with them31. Although most boys have had relationships with local girls in the past, having a tourist girlfriend is seen as much easier and thus more fun: they can hang around in public, introduce her to his family, sleep together, and have sex. Furthermore, boys often say that “local girls always want more”, for example marry them, while most boys do not want to be in such a serious relationship. As Dahles and Bras also argue in their research into Indonesian tour guides, they “perceive any obligation – like a steady job or a marriage that ties them down – as a loss of freedom” (1999, p. 288). Therefore, most surfer boys in Pantai seek for short-term flings and/or long term relationships with western tourist girls; within these relationships, they experience more freedom.

Interesting about the hunting is that often it seems to be about the act of hunting, and not always about who to hunt. Certainly, the boys feel more attracted to some girls and less to others32, but generally, “I’m going hunting tonight!” means that they will try to hunt one of the tourist girls in the bar, regardless whom exactly. The word hunting implies that the boys talk to the girls with a goal: to try to catch her. Thus, with their flirting they try to get in touch with tourist girls and possibly have a fling or relationship33 with her. Girls often enjoy their company and end up hanging out with them as friends, or indeed get romantically involved with them. Secondly, to the boys, most tourists are customers; the people that visit the town are often travelers who spend their money there on surf lessons, food and parties. However, in any relationship between local boys and tourist girls, these economic expectations have to be dealt with, which happens differently per relationship or couple.

Economic inequalities and transactions within relationships

Soon, possibly with Christmas, his girlfriend Yara and her parents will come to Indonesia. They will first go to Bali, and they have asked him to come and visit them there. He will spend some time with them in Bali and they will then fly back to Pantai. Her parents have booked a plane ticket for Jay to go to Bali to see them, and they would also pay for his ticket to Norway if he would go there. Yara always tells him: no worries about money. Her uncle seems to have quite some

style, preference and relationship status of the boy.

31

And clearly, there is also some feeling of being attracted to tourist girls, liking them and/or falling in love with them. However, the dynamics of liking/loving a cross-cultural other will not be discussed explicitly in this thesis.

32

When they have a strong liking or preference for one girl, they sometimes keep trying to hunt her for weeks or months.

33

Every fling or relationship evolves differently, depending on the boy and what he is seeking for, and the girl and her wishes.

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money. Jay tells me that if a girl gives him money, he gives most of it to his mother. For example they would give him 4 or 5 million rupiah [€ 300-350], and then he would keep 1 million [€ 70] himself and he would give the rest of his money to his mother. Jay tells me he is shy with Yara giving him money. He wouldn’t accept it if she would just give it to him out in the open. They were in her home stay and then locked the door. He doesn’t want too many people to know that she gives him money. It is not about the money, anyway. He likes her. But, although he thinks Yara would like to marry him, he doesn’t want to get serious with her. Not yet.

- Notes on an informal interview with Jay, surfer in Pantai.

Quickly into a fling or relationship between a local surfer boy and a tourist girl, there is one issue that is encountered and dealt with; the economic inequality between the two of them and the way it plays out in daily life. When hanging out with the surf boys, tourist girls will quickly notice that most of them do not have a steady income. The salary of employees of surf shops is 1 to 1,5 million rupiah a month [€ 70 to € 100]; which is enough for fifty beers, or a hundred take away meals34, or a third of a surf board, or a helpful contribution to the family income. For local families in Pantai, 1 million rupiah is a lot of money. However, in a scene where there is a party almost every night, where alcohol is relatively expensive, where girlfriends might want to go out for dinner every night, and where the boys are used to sharing their pay with their friends35 and family, a million rupiah can be spent in just a few days. On top of that, some employers do not seem to be able to pay their employees every month and sometimes owe them several months of salary – which sometimes never gets paid. Some surfers are employees of surf shops, others are freelancers. They earn about 100.000 to 300.000 rupiah [€ 7 to € 20] per customer – but their income is subject to the luck they have with finding customers, the contacts they already have, and the time and effort with which they try to find new customers and thus varies widely. And then there is a vast group of surfers who do not have a job. These boys often do hang around at the surf shops, spending time with friends, learning to surf from their older peers, and practicing their English when getting in touch with tourists. These youths do not have an income to spend.

Surely, the boys need money to survive and to do fun stuff. However, much like other possessions such as clothes, surf boards, places to sleep, et cetera, money is often shared.

Consequently, the person with more money often pays for drinks and food for the surf boys without money. Mostly, this will be someone who just had a day of work and earned some money, or someone who has a steady income due to either rich parents or him owning a shop. Thus, the boys that do not have a (steady) job, are being taken care of by their (often older) peers. Some of them do help customers at the shop in exchange for a place to sleep36 and some pocket money for meals.

Thus, many surfing boys do not earn/have a lot of money, especially compared to the budget of western tourists that visit Pantai. Also, when a couple spends time together, the boy often does

34

The boys hardly cook themselves

35

Which I will extensively discuss in chapter three

36

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not work, and then does not have an income. It then makes sense how they often ask or expect the girl to pay some stuff for him. This often already happens during the first days of them being together. Most often, the couple spends the night at the homestay where the tourist girl is staying, since many boys sleep either with their friends in a surf shop or in a shared room they rent, or at their parents’. Some boys have a house of themselves; in these cases, the girlfriend often moves in.

The first night she met him, Lily (early twenties) fell in love. They met at a party in one of the bars; he grabbed her hand, and from that moment on, she was his. Pantai surfer Jeremy and Swedish Lily spent almost every moment together. Although she had only planned on staying in Pantai for a couple of days, she loved the place. She did not need to adhere to a travel schedule and decided to stay for as long as she liked. She rented a room in a homestay and a motorbike. Jeremy quickly moved into her homestay, and every day he drove them to one of the beaches, where she would watch him surf. At night they sometimes went out to have a few beers; most often though, they just spent the evenings together or with some of their Indonesian friends in their home. Lily enjoyed Pantai so much, that after a while she moved into a local home and decided to volunteer in an Indonesian organization. When she left for work in the morning, she would leave some money behind, so that Jeremy could get breakfast. The afternoons they spent together. They went on some trips, and when his surf shorts got stolen, she bought him a new pair. Lily paid nearly everything for Jeremy. At the beginning this only seemed natural; she knew he did not have much money and they had so much fun together that she did not really care. After a while though, she started to realize that he did not have money because he did not work. Most of his friends did work, though. She tried to talk to Jeremy, pointing out that her money was running out, which would mean that she would have to go back home to work. He did not seem to realize this, and got a bit annoyed when Lily calculated a daily budget of 150.000 rupiah [€ 10] for food and drinks for the two of them. Then, they started to argue about money; Lily felt he should find a job in, for example, a surf shop, so that she did not have to pay everything. Jeremy was shy about money, and did not like the fact that he always used her money. But if he were to work, he would have fewer hours to spend with her. He used to help his friend out by looking after a surf shop, and in exchange he could sleep there and eat with the boys in the shop; but that would mean he would not be spending time with Lily. When Lily brought up that he could find a job, he would be shy to talk about it, or sulk and leave the room. Although he had said that he wanted to work, once Lily found him a job in a surf shop, he backed out, because he did not feel like working and wanted to be free to surf or spend time with her. Although they had a lot of fun together, their arguments about money had a big impact upon their relationship.

It makes sense how Lily and Jeremy feel differently about money. For Lily (and many westerners), money is something you need to pay things with: she needed to pay their home stay, their motorbike, their food and their drinks. It is because of the money she had saved that she could be here in Pantai with Jeremy. Without money, she would need to leave this paradise to go home and work, so Lily often calculated how fast her money was running out. She worried about Jeremy who did not want to find a job. For Jeremy though, working would mean a loss of freedom and time, time he would rather spend surfing or hanging out with Lily and his friends. With Lily, they could enjoy her money together; they could go out for dinner and sleep at her homestay. When Lily would leave, he would go back to eating at his parents’ house or with his friends at their surf shop. However, he

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would still be able to do everything he wanted in Pantai. His parents or friends would pay for his food and drinks, and surfing is free and thus always possible. Jeremy’s daily activities and future did not depend that much on Lily’s money; so they might as well enjoy it as much as they could while she still had some.

The problems Lily and Jeremy had concerning money were partly the result of her staying in Pantai for such a long time. Some girls only stay in Pantai for a few days or weeks, and for them it is not such a burden to pay almost everything for their boyfriends, since the place is so cheap. Also, some girls are not on such a tight budget or are shy to say no to sharing money. Others feel like it is only fair that they pay things for their boyfriend: the girls earn so much more at home than the boys earn here, that they are willing to pay things for them. Norwegian Alea told me that one day, her boyfriend Adi was very quiet and seemed sad. When she asked him what was wrong, he had said that he had some money problems: he owed someone 1 million rupiah [€ 70], and the guy wanted his money back. He asked her if she could maybe borrow him the money. She had given it to him: “For him, it is a lot of money. Maybe even a month of working, but for me, it is only a day of work back home”. Of course when she runs out of money she needs to go home, but “here, they don’t even háve the money”, and as long as she has enough, she can help him out in this way.

However, not all the girls encounter these problems. Some boys work and earn some money themselves. Although they earn less than the girls would back home, they are able to pay for some things for themselves. Other boys try to come up with solutions when their girlfriend runs out of money; Pantai surfer Cary and his Dutch girlfriend Eva have been living with his parents for five months, since she had run out of money and otherwise had needed to return home. And then there are a few boys in Pantai who earn quite a lot of money, mostly because their business (often a surf shop) is running well, because they work in Australia a few months a year and get high pay, or because they get sponsored by a surf brand and hereby earn enough money to live comfortably. These boys often provide their female friends or girlfriends with drinks, take care of a few surfing children or share their money with their friends37.

Thus, the boys see money in a very different way than their tourist girlfriends. Whenever they run out (either because they’ve finished their earned money or because of a tourist girl that breaks up with them or leaves town), there are many options to get money, food or drinks from. They can find a job38, eat at their parents’ house, share their friends money, rent out or pawn their surf board, motorbike or phone39, hang out with westerners (male or female) who often pay things for the boys, or steal40; all of these options are (more or less) normal and acceptable ways of gaining money in Pantai. Surely, being with girlfriends or friends is being considered as more fun; therefore, for some boys, it is both easy and fun to get money from girlfriends. The same counts for sharing money with friends: as I will further discuss in chapter three, friends and colleagues often take care of each other in terms of money. Therefore, having to earn money yourself is not always an urgent practice and is sometimes considered as less fun or more difficult.

37

I will discuss money sharing and taking care of one another further in chapter three.

38

Informal and temporary jobs are very easy to find in Pantai.

39

To either surf shops, tourists or pawnbrokers, depending on what they have to rent out.

40