Mountain Java in History and Social Theory

The Political Economy of Mountain Java
An Interpretive History
Robert W. Hefner
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Berkeley · Los Angeles · Oxford
© 1990 The Regents of the University of California

It's not like before. In the old days people here were different from those in the lowlands [ngare]. They weren't interested in wearing fine clothes that drew attention to themselves, or in eating special foods like those you see today. Even though some people owned more and some less, people dressed and ate the same. At harvest people of all backgrounds worked together in the fields. Nobody was ashamed of calloused hands or dirty feet. Now it's different. Those who are well off [sing nduwe] want to give orders and keep their hands and feet clean of earth. They keep track of everything they give and everything they get in return. It's just like the lowlands. Everything is counted up [diperhitung] and owned.
—A TOSARI FARMER, 1985

Economic change is a moral as well as material process। Its impact is felt not only in the brute facts of income and production but in the reshaping of identity, aspirations, and authority. In the modern West, the growth of industrial capitalism undermined traditional values, challenged social hierarchies, and reorganized even the most intimate aspects of our daily lives. The more stable structure and needs of traditional society gave way to a world in which identity and tastes were continuously refashioned in the allied interests of production and status. Today, of course, this peculiar development is no longer restricted to the Western world. As the "great transformation" of economy and society has spread from the First World to the Third, so has its challenge to received attachments and moralities. Witness to its material force, we are only beginning to comprehend its cultural consequences.

This book is concerned with the reshaping of economy and community in one area of Southeast Asia, the Tengger highlands of East Java, Indonesia, where I first conducted research in the late 1970s. This was a time of great change on this densely populated island. A few years earlier, in the mid 1960s, Indonesia had witnessed the cataclysmic destruction of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI). Some of the most sustained violence of that period occurred in areas of East Java not far from the Tengger highlands. In the aftermath of the bloodshed, a more conservative, military-dominated "New Order" government, as it is called, took power. It quickly reversed Indonesia's restrictive policies on foreign investment and launched a number of ambitious, if sometimes controversial, economic projects. The new regime created programs for the distribution of "green revolution" seeds, fertilizers, and credit. It improved roads and distribution networks. Luxury consumer goods soon flooded rural markets, accentuating the difference between rich and poor. At the same time, the government imposed tight restrictions on political activity, warning of the threat of communist subversion and Islamic extremism.
By the early 1970s the impact of these programs was being felt even in mountain areas of Java. In the Tengger highlands, roadbuilding brought motor transport, consumer goods, and a heightened government presence. Farmers who could afford green-revolution agrochemicals shifted from cultivation of food staples to lucrative cash crops. Japanese-made consumer goods began to replace traditional religious festivals (slametan ) as the preferred indices of wealth and prestige. In every aspect of life, it seemed, a region that had once proudly distanced itself from the hierarchy and inequality of the surrounding lowlands awoke to find itself very much part of larger Java. A world was on the wane. Its passing was evident not simply in income and production, but in the altered bases of identity and authority.
Although my first concern in this book is to examine the history and consequences of this great transformation, from precolonial times to today, this local example is intended to raise general questions on the nature of economic life, the sources of social power, and the impact of development on both. In so doing, this study seeks to present a noneconomistic account of economic change.
My analysis departs from conventional economic approaches in several ways. It emphasizes, first of all, that individuals formulate and interpret their needs in interaction with others around them, rather than in the solitary introspection of neoclassical economics's "sovereign" consumer (Scitovsky 1976; Bourdieu 1977, 177). Second, it shifts the problem of identity and community to the center of research, recognizing that social practice is guided by a wider range of "commitments" than market utility alone, and by a more complex sense of self (Sen 1977, 328; Etzioni 1988, 11; Ortner 1984, 151). From this perspective, the rational actor of economistic analysis (Popkin 1979; Feeny 1983) is not so much wrong as woefully overschematized. Third, and finally, a noneconomistic approach to economic change stresses that, whatever their relative autonomy, the market and other economic institutions are ultimately dependent upon the moral, political, and legal institutions of society as a whole (Giddens 1987, 136). Hence economic change is never just a matter of technological diffusion, market rationalization, or "capitalist penetration." Deep down, it is also a matter of community, morality, and power. All of these are at issue in the great transformation reshaping our world.

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