Alberto Gomes' Looking for Money is a careful ethnographic study of the Semai people of Peninsular Malaysia, documenting what actually happens when capitalism enters a community that has historically organised life around subsistence, kinship and relative autonomy.

Gomes examines how market relations are negotiated, resisted and absorbed through everyday life. Labour, agriculture, trade, household organisation and authority are all shown to shift unevenly, producing forms of economic participation that rarely resemble the clean narratives of "development" often found in policy or economics.

Drawing on extensive fieldwork, the book sits at the intersection of anthropology, political economy and Indigenous studies. Gomes is particularly attentive to how wage labour, commodity production and state development projects reshape social relations without entirely displacing older systems of reciprocity and collective life. The result is an unusually grounded account of capitalism as something lived rather than theorised: messy, contingent and mediated through local histories rather than imposed upon passive subjects. It remains an important contribution to the anthropology of Southeast Asia and to broader debates around development, indigeneity and the social life of markets.

First edition, first printing. Published jointly by the Center for Orang Asli Concerns (Malaysia) and Trans Pacific Press (Australia), 2004. Very good condition. Paperback with light shelf wear, minor rubbing to the covers and a small crease to the lower corner. Binding is firm, pages are clean and unmarked throughout.