Money Makes You Crazy Makes a Whole Lot of Sense!

In Money Makes You Crazy, author Ross McDonald presents an all-too-familiar portrait of the havoc that unbridled capitalist economic development schemes are wreaking on the Solomon Islands. For McDonald, fascinated by the contrast between the "self-sufficient world" of basic sanity and genuine contentedness still found in most Solomon Island villages, and the "often strained workaday existence of the more 'developed' world", the ruin visited on customary culture by capitalism stands in stark contrast to various efforts made over the past several decades by Solomon Islanders to chart a different, compromise course.

In the book's first few pages, McDonald documents the struggles of several Solomon Islands communities to pursue an alternative approach to development. This grew out of his fieldwork in the Solomons between 1998 and 2001. Each of the book's five chapters records a visit the author made to communities on New Georgia, Malaita, and Guadalcanal. Each chapter raises one or more of the key problems facing Indigenous islanders, many generated by foreign companies and corporations: land appropriation for mining and other projects, often with grossly inadequate compensation; unsustainable logging practices; or declining fish stocks. The increasing intrusion of a cash economy has also eaten away at traditional community bonds, tempting greedy local chiefs to cut selfish deals with foreign business interests, and luring youth away from the villages with the promises of a showy, consumerist lifestyle in the capital, Honiara.

Each chapter (with one key exception) also relates the efforts of local groups and communities to take charge of their own destiny and manage development for the good of all, rather than for selfish personal interests. These efforts range from the educational programmes and volunteer reforestation work of the Christian Fellowship Church on New Georgia, to the local sustainable tourism practices of a New Georgian village, to the historical cooperative movements of Malaita (Maasina Rulu) and Guadalcanal (Moro Kastom Kampani). Interestingly, a number of these efforts combine messianic leadership and legacy with modern economic and educational ventures.

It is in these movements that McDonald sees the main hope for helping the Solomons avoid the pitfalls of modern capitalist life. In their adherents and leaders, he finds a great and simple wisdom" of cooperation and human caring/sharing. Yet a number of the historical movements he encounters also seem to have stalled due to colonial persecution or refusal of support by both colonial and post-colonial governments. Thus, the challenges they face are not presented with naive optimism.

Particularly tragic is the story of the residents of Gold Ridge, whose land was appropriated by an Australian mining company, working with the Solomon's own government, both eager to benefit from the area's abundant gold reserves. Given meager compensation and resettled in a shabbily-built, unhygienic settlement in an isolated spot, the former Gold Ridge natives with little means of livelihood seemed doomed, according to McDonald, to squander their compensation payments on drink or gambling in order to soothe their pain.

The author's account is sensitive and sympathetic to Indigenous Solomon Islanders who find themselves in such terrible straits, as well as to those still living in custom areas, and those trying to fight against the tide of consumerist individualism. With deft anecdotes he draws our attention to basic issues and attitudes important to the conflicts he is examining. What seems to be missing, however, is a more comprehensive analysis of the overarching political dynamics of the country. Given recent events, such an account could have brought added clarity to how multinational-driven development works to corrupt the national government and exacerbate ethnic tensions, making the work of cooperative community movements even more difficult, albeit necessary.

Money Makes You Crazy by Ross McDonald (Dunedin, New Zealand: University of Otago Press, 2003) ISBN: 1 877276 44 8.

Michael Bodden is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Pacific and Asian Studies, University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada. He teaches Indonesian-Malay language, literature, theatre, and Pacific literature.