This paper examines a system of rotating savings and credit associations (ROSCAs) in terms of the polysemantic nature of money. The system is called a tontine (or cotisation) in Francophone Cameroon. Tontines appear in a variety of formes, but the basic pattern is that members of a group make monetary contributions at fixed intervals (once a week, once a month, etc.) and take turns receiving the total amount collected or a portion of it. Tontines are the most popular savings and loan method in Cameroon, especially among the Bamileke who are known as the "commercial people of Cameroon". The Bamileke ethnic group originated in the West Province of Cameroon, where the people are divided into over a hundred small chiefdoms that are stratified to a high degree. Even now the unity of a chiefdom is sometimes stronger than that of the Bamileke as a whole. Since the beginning of the 20th century many of the Bamileke have migrated and settled in big cities and plantation areas throughout the country. It is in the places where they have settled that their "Bamileke" identity is the strongest, and the capital Yaounde is one such place. It was primarily Yaounde that I carried out my fieldwork, but I also investigated a chiefdom in the Bamileke region. The Bamileke are numerous in the main cities of Cameroon in spite of being relatively recent arrivals there. They make up at least 30% of the population of Yaounde, and they are the majority in Douala, the largest city of Cameroon. Thus, we can say that they comprise an important part of Cameroonian urban economy and society. Some Bamileke entrepreneurs use banks, but they also continue to use tontines. Why is it that they like to use tontines, whether or not they are wealthy, and even when there are banks nearby? There is a serious negative reason: the instability of the formal banking system. But there are positive reasons as well. Many urban Bamileke organize tontines with people who came originally from the same chiefdom. It is said that in a big city like Yaounde all Bamileke chiefdoms have their own associations (I call them Home-Village Associations or HVAs). Subscription is voluntary, but many Bamileke belong to them. Meetings are usually once a week, on Saturday or Sunday afternoon. The purpose of the HVAs is the mutual assistance of members. That is, tontines are not the main activity. For members, insurance (in the case of death of an HVA member or of a rlative of a member, a fixed amount of money is paid according to a rule) and participation in funeral sevices (members participate in the funeral services for deceased members of the same HVA) are the main activities of HVAs. But it is important to note that tontines are indispensable to HVAs. In many HVAs, to participate in a tontine is an obligation. This is because "no one would take coming to a meeting seriously if there were no tontine." Although people do not gather because of the tontine, they will not gather without it. The structure of tontines provides stability: you cannot stop once you start and you are obliged to pay your portion of the tontine. In any case, the tontine payment must somehow be made, because the money of a tontine never dies. However, the gathering of money and people is not the only raison de'etre of tontines. They also compel people to earn money. Generally, earning and saving money is viewed as an individulistic act. But the HVAs force Bamileke to earn money, by making them participate in tontines. The command "participate in the tontine!" is equivalent to "earn money (for the tontine)!" Conversely, we could say that tontines enable the legitimate accumulation of capital. In other words, those who participate in them can justify their "selfish" act of earning money by seeming to earn for the collective. Although Bamileke are sometimes criticized for depositing money into banks, they

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History turned into one of the foci of concern in anthropology during the 1980s. This "historical turn" in anthropology developed from the broad diffusion of post-colonialism into this discipline, which began late in the 1970s. In other words, anthropology, like many other socio-cultural sciences, was involved in a struggle for the liberation of non-Western peoples from the so-called "essentialism" that perceives and narrates them as if they were atemporal beings. Therefore, it is hardly surprising that, in the early stages of that "turn", to historicize the Other was regarded as anthropologists' "moral imperative" rather than what was required in the course of empirical investigation. It seems that the political and academic significance of historicizing the Other has already been argued out. In addition, the criticism of anthropology based on superficial historical description has also played out its course. It is unclear what course historical investigation in anthropology should pursue in the future. Yet it will probably not touch on the dim and remote past that indirectly relates to the understanding of the present. As long as ethnographic studies based on field research retain canonical importance in anthropology, I think historical investigation in the discipline will probably endeavor to understand the present through exploring that vast network of causal nexuses that brought the present into being, bearing in mind that the present is the cumulative effect of the past historical processes. This article is an attempt to practice such a historical study for understanding the present. Specifically I explicate how trade and warfare conducted actively in central Flores until the early 20th century causally relates to the present state of social life there. Notwithstanding, this is a small but important part of the vast network of historical causal nexuses which should be taken into consideration in the ethnographic study of central Flores. For instance, Dutch colonial policy, Catholic missionary work and the development policy of the Soeharto Government are also of great importance for understanding present-day central Flores society, although I am scarcely able to mention them in this article for reasons of space. Section I and II of this essay firstly describe a correspondence, too remarkable to be a coincidence, between the use of the Lionese therms for "north" and "south" with the uneven south-north distribution of population in central Flores. Secondly, these sections argue that it is difficult to explain these correspondences in therms of natural environmental factors, and that they were caused mainly by trade. Ecological factors do not vary between the Dutch administrative "subdivisions"(onderafdeeling) labeled Ende and Maumere in central Flores. However, in the 1970s the south coastal area was far more densely populated than the north coastal area in Ende but not in Maumere. Moreover, a closer examination reveals that the most heavily inhabited areas in those "subdivisions", namely Ende/Pulau Ende in Onderafdeeling Ende and Geliting/Ili in Onderafdeeling Maumere, were the hubs of the trading activities conducted in the waters surrounding Flores to which Dutch colonial rule pit an end early in the 20th century. The following section, based mainly on oral histories widely known in central Flores' largest political domain, Lise, elucidates how the trade conducted on the south coast I the vicinity of Ende/Pulau Ende, as well as warfare over profit and firearms obtained from commerce, were a matter of life-and-death for the local people until early in the 20th century. Political domains that failed to obtain gold and firearms could not but surrender to, or be defeated by, those who had preempted them. The aforementioned uneven distribution of population around Ende/Pulau Ende was

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This essay aims to historicize a phenomenon currently labeled as "globalization" to better understand the essential nature it retains across time and space. Taking the northern region of the island of Borneo as a case in point, a couple of historical ethnographies, one from the interwar period of the 1920s and 1930s and the other from the past two decades in the history of the Bornean hinterland, are presented to compare the organizational features of labor mobilization which was indispensable for the production strategies pursued by the colonial as well as postcolonial regimes. The first case attends to the mode of labor mobilization observable under the North Borneo Chartered Company before World War II, when Chinese and Javanese coolies were marshalled to work in rubber cultivation in the colony. The networking of European entrepreneurs, establishment of inter-colonial cooperation by the British and Dutch, and the working of supranational bodies such as the International Labour Organization(ILO) are closely scrutinized. The second case takes us to the production sites of present East Malaysia where new forms of transnational capital formation are observed. Special attention is paid to the labor mobilization of Indonesian workers in the timber-related industries, oil palm plantations, and afforestation projects for pulp production. While the Chinese business networks encompassing East and West Malaysia, mainland China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, and the Philippines largely undertake such ventures, the capital and technology transfer from Japanese corporations also play a vital role in maintaining the new form of international labor division. The comparison of organizational as well as structural power surrounding the mobilization of indentured laborers both in the interwar period and at the present time suggests an oscillating nature of globalization with such common characteristics as transnationalism, social hybridity, displacement, and deterritorialization. The concluding discussion centers on the possible contribution from anthropological fieldwork to the study of history through the retroactive understanding of the past.

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Since the 1990s the syncretic religion called Santeria has gained unprecedented popularity in Cuba. The rapid increase in the numbers of practitioners of this religion was, and remains, an unexpected phenomenon for the revolutionary government, which had tried to confine Afrocuban culture, including Santeria, within the bounds of museum exhibitions or stage performances, while at the same time calling for liberation from superstitious beliefs in daily life. The fact that this increase was intimately related to the remittance-dollar economy - officially sanctioned in 1993 with a purely practical (i.e. non-religious) objective - introduced a particular sense of anxiety into the revolutionary government's "regime of knowledge." In chapter III, I delineate the contours of this anxiety by paying particular attention to its relation to the future-oriented historical imagination of the revolutionary government, which has formed around the conceptual divide between 'spirit (espiritu)' and 'matter (materia).' In chapter IV, I reexamine the early 20th century study of spiritualism (espiritismo) and fetishism (fetichismo) conducted by the Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz and his follower Israel Castellanos, and argue that it contains a similar kind of anxiety. In chapter V, I conclude that the anxiety of the revolutionary government is not specific to the present politico-economic situation but has been inherited and repeated throughout history.

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