Bule Prices: Why We Should Pay Them

“When they have nothing why do you have something?” –  “My Country” by Tune-Yards

“Bule!” 

This is the call which greets me everywhere I go in rural Java.  It occurs far less in my village now that I’ve been here for eight months, but as soon as I endeavor somewhere new on my bike or on a bus I am certain to labeled as such. In Indonesian, the word “bule” means foreigner.  Although Indonesia has many beautiful sites, rural Java doesn’t attract much tourism, which means that bule sightings are few and far between.  This lack of bule traffic partly explains why we receive the attention that we do.

But being a bule doesn’t just welcome unwanted shout-outs, it also means we are treated differently in many regards.  Upon arriving in Indonesia, our cultural facilitators warned us to stay vigilant regarding “bule prices” when shopping at the market or riding public transportation.  As Americans, our knee-jerk reaction is to recoil in anger at such a practice.  “It’s the principle of it,” we argue adamantly. “Why should we be charged differently?”  Yet, when we remove ourselves from the scenario, we begin to see the real “principle” that we are defending.

In David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years, he includes an anecdote provided to him by a friend who spent a bit of time living in Indonesia:

An anthropologist who lived for some time in rural Java once told me that she measured her linguistic abilities by how well she could bargain at the local bazaar. It frustrated her that she could never get it down to a price as low as local people seemed to pay. "Well," a Javanese friend finally had to explain, "they charge rich Javanese people more, too. “

The chapter in which this quotation is taken from is entitled, “The Moral Grounds of Economic Relations”.  In this chapter Graeber discusses the way in which merchants living in various societies and epochs over the last 5,000 years have “often reduced prices for the needy.”  What Javanese sellers are doing is merely flipping the script. 

Before I go further, I will acknowledge that obviously not every Westerner is wealthy, but in comparison to a Javanese man or woman selling goods in a rural market, the Westerner is more often than not far better off financially. With this in mind, the Javanese seller is merely asking that we, as wealthy people (on a global scale), pay a little bit more.  It’s certainly not out of turn when one considers how much cheaper food is in Indonesia when compared to prices at an American supermarket.  The seller is certainly making an assumption (that we are backed up by an American bank account), but as the anecdote indicates, the longer one proves to be living on Java, the more relaxed the bule tax becomes.  

A couple of months ago – before I was more privy to this idea (I had yet to read Graeber, Mike Davis, and others) – I took a becak (pedicab) ride.  The driver pedaled me about two kilos.  When I got out of my seat and asked him for the price, he told me that I owed him 50,000 Rupiah, which is about $5.00 dollars.  Thankfully, I was completely uncomfortable bargaining (not necessarily for the right reasons at that time) so I forked over my 50,000 Rupiah and walked away feeling I’d been taken, at least a little bit.

The following weekend I read Mike Davis’ Planet of Slums.  In his book, Davis discusses the way in which informal economies are burgeoning in the world’s poorest countries, typically propped up by those who live in slum communities or are altogether homeless.  Davis – who references Indonesia as being one of the nations greatest effected by this problem – further states that one of the most popular jobs for the homeless is driving a pedicab.  I was instantly floored.  Anyone who has spent time in an Indonesian city knows that pedicabs are ubiquitous. Who knew they doubled as homes? That night I happened to still be in Surabaya, and during a late night stroll I was able to see exactly what Davis was talking about.  On every block pedicabs were parked in various lots, with their owners curled up inside of them sleeping off the previous day’s work.

I thought back to the ride I was given a week or so earlier, and I was a little relieved that I had given the becak driver the 50,000 Rupiah he asked for, but I wished I had done it out of altruism and not simply because I dislike bargaining.  The poor aren’t exploiting us foreigners; rather, they are simply trying to put food in their stomachs.  That’s not too much to ask, is it?  Since they don’t have the funds to buy what they need, they obtain them by charging higher prices to people who typically can afford paying them.  Once again, that’s not too much to ask.

I’ve now realized that paying the bule price was something I was totally wrong in fighting.  These aren’t wealthy people trying to pick my pockets with obscene usury fees; these are people without a roof over their heads or a spare change of clothes in their bags who are simply trying to survive. 

Paying a little extra is the very least that we can do to help their plight, and quite frankly, they're entitled to it (and so much more). It’s not a long term solution, but if we can’t make this small gesture now than there’s no way we can be relied on to stimulate real change in the future, which will certainly require grander gestures. 

Ultimately, if it’s truly about the principle of the matter, we need to ask ourselves what our principles really are.