I never imagined I would end up doing a PhD on gold. Even during fieldwork, spending about 15 months on a single street of gold trade, I mostly treated gold as a backdrop. It wasn’t until this final year of my PhD that I realised: gold is actually the main story.
Today, for the first time, I presented this “grown-up” version of the project. And strangely enough, not to anthropologists, but to artists and art scholars at an AAANZ conference in Perth. Somehow that felt right, because what I’m trying to describe about gold and the world it creates is deeply aesthetic: not about beauty, but about how people feel and sense each other through things.
My research comes from Somba Opu, a short, crowded street in Makassar where gold moves through many hands: Tionghoa shop owners, Makassarese and Buginese pattimbang (street gold traders), tukang masak (“gold cooks”) who melt scrap into ingots, and goldsmiths. All of this happens in a city shaped by long histories of racialised violence and unequal state scrutiny. Yet on this street, people trade, depend on each other, and somehow manage to live together. Still, suspicion and distrust linger every day.
What fascinates me is not just the trade, but the way this one object gathers people into a fragile kind of coexistence. Yet gold doesn’t overcome or erase difference, as liberal economic assumptions often imagine the market doing. Quite the opposite, it helps stabilise difference. In fact, gold circulates because of the very difference that holds the market.
This challenges multiculturalist ideas that treat difference as something to be tolerated, framing harmonious living as an ideological achievement. In my study, living together isn’t a harmonious state at all, and is less an ideological than socio-material achievement. People gather not despite their differences, but because of them. And objects like gold play a crucial role in making people aware of the shared vulnerability that tangles their lives.
In the talk, I tried to think of gold not as a metaphor but as an active presence: something that helps people sense their mutual dependence while also sharpening the tensions between them. A thing that conducts relationships, and also agitates them. And I’ve been trying to find a language to describe that.
The talk I just gave is an attempt to name this duality. I borrow the idea of “things-in-common” from Tintin Wulia (who chaired the panel I spoke on), and I pair it with what I’m calling “things-in-tension.” For me, gold becomes a way to think about objects that pull people together while keeping difference, risk, and inequality visible in the room.
Maybe that’s the real question behind the whole project: what does it take to hold a shared world together when harmony isn’t guaranteed? What kinds of labour, tact, and vulnerability make everyday coexistence possible?
These are the thoughts that have been sitting with me for a while. The work is still unfolding, but this presentation felt like a small moment of clarity.