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The article focuses on religious organization and economic process in Indonesia. A major by-product of the analysis of the factors making for, or impeding, economic development in the so-called underdeveloped countries of the world is the discovery of religious or other ideological forms of human motivation that shape the cultural specifics of their concepts of welfare and betterment in the production process. In that part of the world where the advanced features of the modern Western market economy and its industrial and financial ancillaries are still relatively novel imports, types of religio-familistic organization still prevail which, with varying degrees of effectiveness, dominate economic life. This paper seeks to illustrate this contention by three examples from the Indonesian sphere: the village and its various territorial and genealogical affiliations; the Islamic sacred foundations; and the altar associations of the Indonesian Chinese. Although the data are limited to Indonesia, it is believed that they have relevance for a wider area.

This article comments on some of the conclusions drawn by Riley E. Baker in respect to significant causative factors in the economic development of the Great Plains area. The economy of, and the techniques employed within, an area are a part of the aggregate economy, not isolated from it. This situation derives largely from the composite of technological developments associated with improved transportation and increased tendencies toward both individual producer and area specialization. The network of interrelationships is not an easy one to explain. Nevertheless, this difficulty does not warrant simplification merely for ease of explanation. Some passages in Baker's paper explicitly, and others by implication, indicate that he leans toward undue simplification, intentional or otherwise. There has appeared a tendency in recent years to interpret the implications of a vastly expanding technological front in terms of the impacts of a few selected techniques lifted from their functional relationships within the integrated whole. This tendency is probably the inevitable result of preliminary observations of the influences of wide technological advances upon the entire structure of an economy.